


malamente

by formercongressman



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Bonding Over Murder, Domestic Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Lesbian AU, Magical Realism, Murder, almost comically excessive amounts of blood, eventual brujeria, i threw in a ghost because why not at this point, if you know anything about small scale agriculture please suspend your disbelief, it's goodbye earl meets volver meets thelma and louise, murderesses fall in love with each other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2020-03-06 02:18:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18841621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formercongressman/pseuds/formercongressman
Summary: In which Brooke might have killed her husband, Vanessa brings tequila, and things proceed logically from there.





	1. alguien cruzando el pasillo

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Committing to a multichapter fic? Sounds too good to be true, yet here we are. I'm so excited to share something from my favorite niche genre: women who bond over killing their abusers. Take care of yourself, as this fic can get dark, but I promise it'll all be ok in the end. 
> 
> A huge thanks to @ohhmeggie for beta-ing, and to everyone on the branjie fic discord for being my eternal cheerleaders <3 <3 <3 love yall!!

So, there’s a dead body in her kitchen. 

Brooke pops a window and sticks her head outside. It’s October, and the crisp evening air soothes the heat she feels building on her neck. She’s perched on a stool, breathing deep, surprisingly calm with all things considered. 

She watches the sunset over the tree-lined street. She waits. For what, she’s not sure.

It’s her husband. Jason. He’s crumpled on the kitchen floor. His arm is extended toward her, rigor mortis locking his hand in a pointed finger. “You fucking bitch,” was the last thing he somehow muttered through his rapidly closing throat. And that was it.  _ Finally _ , that was it. She keeps expecting him to move, now, to jump up and swing at her like any old night, but he is completely still. Turned to stone.

(Perhaps she had known he was deathly allergic to figs. Perhaps she had forgotten to label her freshly baked pastries she stored in the fridge. But, she thinks, when you’ve got a seasonal fruit allergy and a penchant for gluttony, at the end of the day it’s your own damn fault. Brooke doesn’t feel guilty. She’ll sleep tonight.)

There’s no blood, which is good. She’s wearing white shoes. This is a thought she allows to cross her mind.

The sun goes down and she’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there. Finally she pulls out her phone. She’s never had an excuse to use the emergency call button before, but she sure does now.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Hello, there’s been an accident.”  _ Fuck _ . She knows her voice sounds to metered, too steady. How should she sound right now? She breathes in, feels it catch in her throat. “I think? My husband? Is dead?”  _ Better _ .

“Ma’am, have you checked his pulse? Do you know if he is breathing?”

“No, he’s, um…” She stands up and kicks at his extended hand. Rock solid. “He’s cold.”

They ask for an address, and she gives it to them. Then the phone call is over, she’s tapping her nails on the hard plastic of her phone case, and waiting, again. 

Brooke knows there will be questions. She’ll say she was in the bath when he came home from work at the bank, treating herself to a long, languid Friday afternoon, and that she didn’t know anything was wrong until she found him an hour or so later. The house is huge, and she never would have heard anything from up in the bathroom. In actuality, of course, she had been waiting in the living room with a tattered copy of an Ibsen play in her hands, hoping he’d find the pastries, anticipating the wheezing, the choking, and the thud of his body against the tile.

Now she sees the ambulance lights. Then she hears the knock at her door. 

A cool rush surges through her. It’s relief. That’s when she starts crying. 

 

\--

 

Brooke is grateful, at least, for Nina, who knows about 90% of what is going on.

Nina knows that Jason would hit her. Brooke had spent a few nights at Nina’s place, waiting for a fight to blow over, waiting for an insincere apology, and so on and so on. Nina would order Chinese food and mix her a drink and set her hand so gently on Brooke’s arm. And when Brooke would go back the next day, Nina would nod and say, “Alright, sweetie, I’m always here.” That woman had more patience in her body than the rest of the neighborhood combined. 

Nina knows that Brooke wanted Jason dead. Brooke should have left,  _ could _ have left, yes, but at 32 with no degree or practical work experience other than schmoozing at galas and fundraisers and two years with a ballet company in South Africa, leaving Jason wasn’t something she could justify. Plus there was so much money, he was gone a lot, and she had her own herb garden. Jason dying was the best case scenario.

Nina doesn’t know about the figs, and Brooke does not intend to tell her. 

But 90% of the story is enough for Nina to be exactly what Brooke needs at the funeral. Brooke is not the distraught, whimpering widow that Jason’s family is expecting, and Nina goes above and beyond. She steers away Jason’s elderly mother, she holds Brooke while she pretends to cry, and she nods supportively while Brooke delivers a not-at-all-heartfelt eulogy that she looked up online the night before. Nina, in short, makes it easier to play along.

But there’s only so much she can do. It’s 3 p.m. and they’re all still at the graveyard. Jason’s body is finally,  _ finally _ in the ground, but apparently that doesn’t mean that anyone is allowed to go home yet. Jason’s sister has them all sitting in a circle (on the  _ ground _ , in  _ this dress _ ) and they’re going around and saying one nice memory about Jason.

When it comes around to Brooke, she can’t think of a single thing to say. Maybe, if she tried, she could dredge up a memory from before they got married, before he started drinking so much, when there were vacations and gifts and lavish dinners with exciting people. Those times were happy, right? But all she can think about right now is the way his eyes would narrow before he threw a glass, his pointed finger, the sound of his body hitting the kitchen tile. That last one was happy.

“Brooke?”

It’s Nina’s voice. Brooke feels too many eyes on her, and she knows she doesn’t have the filter to fake it right now, so she runs away.

“Excuse me for a moment.”

People make way for her, and she notes the pitying faces. It’s not something she usually likes to see, but it’s better, definitely, that they think what they think. 

“Let’s give her some space. She’s going through a lot.” Nina’s voice again. She owes that woman the first-born child she’ll never have.

The chill, October air hits her again as she finds an exit off the back patio of the funeral home. The graveyard stretches out before her like an invitation, which she accepts. She takes off directionless. For a moment she worries her heels might sink into the earth as she crosses, but they don’t. She wonders how much harder it is to dig graves after the first frost. 

She spots a mausoleum tucked back in the corner of the small graveyard under an old oak tree. It’s made of worn stone, and has a small bench she spots where the light filters in through the trees. She sits down, leans into the cold wall behind her, lets it hold her straight and upright. 

It’s hard to hold a secret.

Brooke can lie for days. She can put on a happy face and lilt through a fundraiser as long as she can lock eyes with Nina across the room and know she’ll have someone to commiserate with after it’s over. This already feels different. She feels like she’s waiting for the ball to drop, for some feeling of remorse to settle in, for a new kind of loneliness to catch up with her just when she thought she might get to start her life again. 

She wonders for a moment about what tomorrow will look like. Casseroles and strangers’ cookware piling up in her sink, that’s for sure. A deposit in her bank account, eventually. Shopping with Nina, a case of red wine, nice things. But what then? 

Maybe, as a twisted joke, she could open a bakery. She’d sell fig pastries year round. 

She’s sure she looks a wreck, and opens her phone camera to try and fix her smudged makeup. At least she looks sad, with one good trail of mascara running down her face from the few tears she had managed to squeeze out. She feels her pocket for tissues and realizes that she’s out, and tries to smudge the tear track away with her finger. It’s not a very successful endeavor, but all she needs to do for now is look  _ just _ put together enough. 

She’s too focused on that to hear the click of another pair of heels against the marble base of the mausoleum until a girl with hair in long, dark waves comes spinning around the corner and nearly topples onto Brooke.

“Oh shit, sorry. I didn’t see you there.” The girl is small, even in heels, and she’s wearing a long black gown and lace gloves that make even Brooke feel pedestrian. Her voice sounds like the crunch of a car rolling slowly down a gravel road. She rights herself, watching Brooke. “Is it wrong to swear in a graveyard? My bad.”

“I don’t fucking know,” Brooke responds instinctually, and then cracks her first authentic smile in three days. 

The girl smiles too. It fills her whole face, and she practically  _ glimmers _ in jarring contrast to the sullen and somber graveyard behind her. She sits down next to Brooke on the bench, carefully.

“Do you want a tissue? Or some tequila?”

“Both, actually, would be wonderful.”

The girl pulls a packet of tissues and a flask from her sleek black clutch. Brooke graciously accepts the flask, takes too big of a swig, and winces as it burns. It tastes like gasoline with notes of vanilla, but Brooke is grateful for anything at this point.

She holds out her hand for a tissue, but the stranger pushes it away. “Let me,” she says, and starts to dab the tissue gently around Brooke’s eye, precise and conscious of her makeup. She’s gentle. “Lemme guess, annoying coworker? Batshit aunt? Your yoga instructor?”

Brooke chuckles. “Husband.”

The girl pulls back, and looks at her quizzically. “No. These aren’t real tears.”

“They are.”

“I’m good at telling when people are lying. So don’t. I can tell you’ve been crying too pretty for these to be real.”

Brooke doesn’t know what to say to that. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

The girl gives her a look, and then goes back to blotting around the corner of her eye. “Was he an asshole?” she asks. Brooke has to hand it to her, this girl is bold. Brooke bites her lip, hesitates. “My boyfriend’s an asshole,” she adds. “So I know.”

There’s a lot unsaid, but she knows too. “Yeah, he was an asshole,” Brooke yields. 

“I won’t say good riddance-”

“You could.”

“Good riddance.”

Brooke sits with that for a moment, and it feels good. Too good, maybe.

“I think I killed him,” Brooke says out loud for the first time. She’s hit with another cool rush. Relief. 

“Oh.” The girl pauses for a nanosecond before switching to the other side of Brooke’s face. “You  _ think _ ?”

“It’s a grey area.”

Brooke isn’t sure what she was expecting at this admission, but it certainly wasn’t nonchalance. This beautiful, bold, and bright stranger nods as if Brooke had just said she likes the color red. And it’s everything she needs. So Brooke doesn’t pour her heart out. Rather, she hands a piece of her demons to this small and radiant person and remains grateful for the weight off her shoulders. 

“There.” The girl finishes up with Brooke’s makeup, her thumb gliding lightly over Brooke’s cheek. “You’re pretty again.”

“I didn’t even ask about you,” Brooke realizes aloud. Unless this stranger is a particularly fashionable twenty-something who haunts the local graveyard during the day (or, perhaps more excitingly, a ghost who haunts it a bit more literally) she’s probably here for a funeral as well.

“Oh.” The girl casts her eyes to the ground for a moment  “I’m here for my abuelita. Good woman, full life. Got to sit with her and hold her hand on the last day. So really, I’m all good.” The smile is back, smaller, but sincere. 

“But you’re drinking?”

“My sixteen year old cousin brought it. Don’t know where she got it, but she’s a smart bitch. Had to confiscate it.” She grins and takes a long swig from the flask, and hands it back to Brooke. “Plus, abuela would have wanted a party.”

“What’s your name?”

“Vanessa.”

“I’m Brooke Lynn. Brooke.”

“It’s good to meet you, Brooke.”

Brooke raises the flask in the air. “To your abuela.”

“To abuelita! And to…” Vanessa hesitates. “Not your husband. To you. Whatever the fucked up circumstances, to you.”

Brooke locks eyes with Vanessa for a moment that lasts maybe half a second, maybe a full minute, she can’t be sure. She bookmarks it as a moment when she feels safe, a moment when she actually feels okay. She watches intently as the corner of Vanessa’s mouth turns up in a smile before she kicks back the flask again. Vanessa follows suit.

“I feel like I should be thanking you,” Brooke says as she winces through the taste.

“For my cousin’s cheap tequila? No need.”

“No, more for… I don’t know, listening. You’re easier to talk to than most people.”

“I like secrets. Don’t worry.” Vanessa places her hand on Brooke’s knee, and she could swear that she feels an actual electric spark travel down her leg as Vanessa presses her thumb into her skin. Or maybe she just imagined it. 

Vanessa stands, stuffs her things back into her bag, and squares her shoulders. “I’m glad I met you, Brooke. Don’t have too much fun in there, okay?”

“Okay,” Brooke says, and surprises herself with the sweetness behind her own laugh.

Vanessa turns to leave, and for a quick flash, Brooke thinks about following her, reaching for her arm, asking for her number. But all too quickly Vanessa is out of sight, out of earshot, outside Brooke’s world and back in her own. 

“Thank you,” Brooke says softly, to no one but the marble floor. 


	2. una voz en la escalera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Brooke starts seeing ghosts, and Vanessa might just be a ghost hunter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's right!! i wrote a second chapter!! i've been in the mountains for a bit so this has been slow coming, and this is long with a lot of character development, but i promise you this i've got big stuff coming up next buddy!!
> 
> another big shoutout to Meggie for betaing, and the branjie avengers for still loving me even though i disappeared on a walkabout briefly

Brooke tries to start a new life.

She eats the obligatory casseroles, she boxes up Jason’s things, and she stores the two gifted copies of _Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul_ that she does not intend to read on the bottom row of her bookshelf.

She goes to yoga. It’s been a long time since she danced, and a long time since she’s done anything that felt good with her body. It’s not an easy thing to get back into, _moving_ like this, but she starts to feel little openings as the muscles in her back click into place. It feels like coming home.

She bakes. Excessively. Muffins and cookies and pies stack up in her refrigerator. She attempts a souffle, and it’s surprisingly successful. Nina graciously accepts the leftovers that Brooke can’t keep. On Sunday morning she invites Nina over and they share mimosas and omelettes and homemade croissants. 

She finishes the Ibsen play. It has a wonderful ending.

But ultimately, Brooke finds that she has a lot of time on her hands, no job, and more than enough money in her bank account to have no motivation to change that. It’s not exactly good for her. She goes into her kitchen sometimes at sunset and sits on the same stool, fixates on the same spot on the tile floor, replays the thud and his voice and the crackle of his breath. She smokes a cigarette out the window until the night air is too cold to bear. She eats the rest of the fig pastries.

(She’d do it again, of course. Maybe spill some blood this time. Maybe give someone a reason to be more suspicious. At least it would give her something to do.)

About two weeks in, she starts seeing ghosts.

Okay, it’s probably not a ghost. It’s not a cohesive haunting. It’s all little things, like an inexplicably moving shadow. It’s a glass that falls and breaks for no reason. It’s creaks in the floorboards upstairs that she used to attribute to Jason stumbling around, but probably they were always there. There’s no form, nothing that carries his face, but Brooke is pretty sure he’s found his way back into the house and he’s following her around. The heat rumbles on and she flinches.

This, she tells Nina. Nina doesn’t need any more information to know why Brooke might be feeling this way. She’s committed to never telling her, but as it gets more and more unnerving to be alone in her own home, that gets all the more challenging a decision to have made. 

“You’re freaking yourself out. You need to make friends,” Nina tells her over the phone. Nina, bless her, just thinks she’s bored. “People to go out with, that kind of thing.”

“You’re my friend.”

“Most people have more than one friend, sweetheart.”

 _Touché_.

She doesn’t want to fake her way through a grief support group, and she thinks she’s somehow managed to intimidate everyone in her yoga class before she could even introduce herself. At one point she feels like she’s really hitting it off with the Trader Joe’s cashier, but on the walk back to her car she realizes it’s probably his job to be nice to her.

Maybe she’ll adopt a cat. Jason was allergic to that, too.

Her mind drifts back to Vanessa, as it has a couple of times now. Brooke thinks that it’s possible that she might have been a ghost too, come to think of it. Vanessa is still the only person she’s told (she’s not going to spring this on the Trader Joe’s cashier) which keeps her as a constant presence at the back of Brooke’s mind. That, and she can still feel that spark on her skin where Vanessa had placed her hand. It lingers.

It’s surprisingly easy to find her. Brooke isn’t very good with computers, but the cemetery has an online calendar and there was only one other burial the same day as Jason’s. Lidia Augustina Mateo, age 95. She searches the name, finds an obituary, and then finds her name in the long list of her abuela’s surviving relatives. _Vanessa Isabella Mateo._

So that’s how Brooke finds herself on Vanessa’s Facebook page. Brooke’s cursor hovers over the message button before she starts second guessing herself. Maybe this is weird. This is probably weird. But nothing is quite normal these days and Brooke needs someone to really talk to, and it feels like she’s got very little to lose.

B: _Hey! Sorry if this is out of the blue or creepy, but I was wondering how you were doing the other day and thought I would ask. Let me know if you’d ever want to get drinks and catch up._

She hits send before she reads it back. It’s way too much. She throws in an addendum that doesn’t help:

B: _This is Brooke, by the way. From the graveyard._

She closes her laptop and tosses it to the other end of the couch. Either she’ll respond or she won’t. She scrolls through pictures of cats at a local animal shelter on her phone, ready to accept her fate.

But an hour or so later she checks her computer, almost forgetting. And there’s a notification.

V: _Oh I remember you, Brooke from the graveyard_

V: _I’m glad you sent this, should have gave you my number lol_

V: _What are you up to tonight?_

So it’s really that easy. They plan to meet at a rooftop bar that’s a few blocks from Brooke’s house and Brooke swaps out her sweatpants for tailored slacks. About thirty seconds into her walk over she regrets the heels, but she grins and bears it.

When she gets there, Vanessa is sitting at a high top table, absently swinging her feet, focused intently down at her phone. Her hair falls in loose ringlets over her shoulders, and for a moment Brooke wonders if Vanessa might just be one of those people who always looks effortlessly gorgeous. She thinks this with a tinge of jealousy and a bit of awe. Vanessa tosses her hair to the side and cocks her head with a smile when she notices Brooke hovering in the entrance, and Brooke stops wondering, becomes more sure.

It’s cold so they’re inside, but Vanessa has snagged a table right by the window, so at least they have a view.

“I’m still surprised you were free tonight,” Brooke says as Vanessa pops off of her chair and kisses the air next to Brooke’s cheek.

“Oh, any excuse for drinks on a Wednesday and girl, I’m there.”

As if on cue, the waiter brings over a drink Vanessa had already ordered. It’s bright pink, with a cherry at the bottom.

“Big sweet tooth?” Brooke asks through half a smile.

“Massive,” Vanessa answers as she joyfully sips her sugary drink.

Brooke gets a Manhattan and drinks it slowly as Vanessa leans back on her chair, balancing precariously on two legs of the stool, and quizzes Brooke about her world and her life.

“So tell me about this luxury. What’s it like to be rich, white, and unemployed?”

Stories spill out of Brooke like Vanessa has just turned on the faucet. She talks about lazing the day away binging Netflix on the couch in her pajamas. She describes the thrilling panic of almost burning down her house when she fucked up and tried to bake cookies at 530 degrees instead of 350 like the recipe said. She complains about the thin girls in her yoga class who are married to tech magnates at 24 and think green juice will save their lives. Vanessa rolls her eyes, nods, is somehow absolutely enraptured. Brooke doesn’t mention the ghost. Yet.

“I think I might get a cat,” she says, and Vanessa’s face lights up.

Brooke doesn’t understand how, but she makes Vanessa laugh. Her laugh is really more of a screech, which bounces off of the tables and finds its way into every nook and cranny of the crowded bar. She draws attention, but Brooke finds she doesn’t mind.

The waiter comes back by when they both have empty glasses and ask if they’d like another drink. Brooke quickly orders another round, but Vanessa waves him off. Brooke looks at her with an arched, inquisitive eyebrow.

“Oh, I love a fancy cocktail,” Vanessa explains, “But it’s pricey, you know?”

“I’ll pay.” Brooke doesn’t hesitate. “Get whatever you like.”

She could swear Vanessa blushes as she looks at the ground, but it’s probably just the liquor. She orders another drink.

“But you, tell me about you,” Brooke says. “I don’t even know what you do.”

“I work at a dress store. Weddings, proms, that kind of thing. It’s good money, but I swear if it wasn’t for that and the girls I get to work with, I’d quit in a second.” She talks about her friends and coworkers, Silky and A’keria, and the one dress a month they work together to steal without their boss noticing. Vanessa had gotten the one from last month, the same one she wore to her abuela’s funeral. She rolls her eyes while she recounts the story of the mother-of-the-bride who insisted on trying on a teenager’s homecoming dress, and A’keria had to step in to keep Vanessa from losing her customer service cool.

It strikes Brooke how Vanessa is truly different than anyone she has ever really gotten to know, the sharpest possible contrast to the flippant wives of Jason’s coworkers and the always-collected fundraiser organizers she actually got along pretty well with. It stings, a bit, as Brooke realizes just how small her world had grown. But Vanessa is here in front of her, a dazzlingly authentic person, and Brooke’s gratitude doubles.

They get their third round of drinks, and that’s when Vanessa crosses one leg over the other, leans back, and asks, “So like, how are you _doing_ doing?”

Brooke is drunk enough to know exactly what she means but not quite drunk enough to be so transparent. “I thought I told you.”

“I haven’t told nobody your secret,” she says, softer, “And I’m guessing you haven’t either.”

Brooke looks around the room. She had been so focused that she hadn’t realized how much the bar had filled up, and that suddenly feels like too much. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”

“Hm. Let’s go outside, then.”

Before Brooke can protest that it’s too cold for that, Vanessa’s got her drink in her hand and a faux fur coat tossed over her shoulder, and Brooke can’t think to do anything other than throw on a jacket and follow her.

The night air doesn’t sting like she had anticipated. She’s warmed by the buzz of the alcohol she can feel vibrating just beneath her skin. Vanessa’s standing by the railing near the edge of the roof, up on her toes even in heels to peer down over the edge to the street below. Brooke joins her, shoulder to shoulder, and she focuses beyond the colorful neon of the buildings to the small dots of light from the fishing boats speckling the horizon of the lake. 

“I’m not doing well,” Brooke finally says. “I’m seeing ghosts.”

Vanessa’s eyes light up a bit. “Like what? Are you seeing figures? Cold spots? You don’t know this about me yet, but I _will_ go full ghost hunter if I have to.”

“It’s just little things, shadows and creaks and stuff like that.”

Vanessa hums. “That’s less exciting.”

“I promise you, it’s still pretty terrifying.”

Vanessa sips her drink, and clicks her tongue in disapproval. “Sounds to me like you’re still scared of a dead man.”

“That’s… no.”

“You are. You’re living like he’s gonna get up out of that coffin and come after you again.” Vanessa sets down her drink and fixes her hair with purpose. “Listen, this shit fucks you up bad. _I know_ this shit fucks you up bad. But like, if he’s in the ground, he’s in the ground. And you gotta live your own life, cause he’s not coming back.”

Brooke sighs. She fixates on a rooftop terrace a few blocks away, where someone is growing tomatoes and rosemary and she can’t make out what else. It feels like Vanessa has peeled back Brooke’s skin, already knows the layout of the gears turning underneath, pinpoints the problem in a heartbeat. Maybe this is just what it’s like to be vulnerable, really vulnerable. Maybe this is a vivisection.

Noticing Brooke’s silence, Vanessa speaks up again. “Sorry, this shit gets me worked up.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s--” It’s what? _Indicative of a level of care no one has shown for me in a very long time_? She can’t just say that, even though it’s probably the truth. “It’s good.”

“I’m just… I’m jealous. Maybe that’s a fucked up thing to say, but I clearly have no filter here and it’s not like you’re some kind of saint. But if I was in your position, I would… Shit, I don’t know. It’s an opportunity, is what I’m saying. You just gotta figure out what you want.”

(Brooke wants to swim out to the fishing boats and see how big those lights actually are. She wants to perform internationally again, but she knows that door has probably closed. She wants to pick a sprig of rosemary from that rooftop garden and carry it around in her pocket. She wants someone to know her better than she knows herself, to love her for her, as soon as she figures out who she is now. And she wants another drink.)

One of these ideas is immediately accomplishable, so she settles on that.

“I want scotch,” Brooke answers simply.

“What?” Vanessa looks at her like she’s snapped, which maybe she has.

“Do you like scotch? There’s this bottle Jason was saving, real top shelf stuff, and he would get so pissed if I ever moved it--”

“And we’re going to smash it.”

“No, we’re going to _drink_ it. But with the same level of spite. I live close. Come on.”

She’s drunk enough that the walk back feels like floating, even though she might stumble a bit on the uneven sidewalks. And if Vanessa pulls Brooke’s arm over her shoulder to keep her steady, she’s not complaining.

Brooke moves to pull her keys out of her pocket once they’re outside her house, and Vanessa freezes in place. Brooke unlocks the gate as she watches Vanessa’s eyes dart between the high shrubs, the columns and arches, and the fountain trickling lightly outside. 

“Oh, so she’s _rich_ rich,” Vanessa muses.

“ _He_ was rich, I just lucked out,” is the only way she can think to answer.

“Shut up. You have a fucking _fountain_ . In front of your _house_.”

“Yeah, isn’t it gaudy?”

Vanessa’s eyes narrow, and she cups her hand to catch a bit of water flowing from the fountain, and flings it at Brooke.

“Bitch!” she shrieks, because it’s cold, but can’t resist the laugh she feels bubbling up. She digs up a shred of self-awareness. “I deserved that.”

“You did."

Brooke sits next to Vanessa on the edge of the fountain for a moment, as she traces a finger idly through the water.

“So you got all of this?” Vanessa asks, “All his money too?" 

“Not all. But quite a bit, yes.” She had reviewed the will with their lawyer a few days ago, and was frankly shocked at how much he had left for her. Maybe he had drawn it up before he had turned so cruel. Maybe he had just been too lazy to change it. But either way, Brooke knew if she played her cards right, she was set for life. 

“Damn. You gotta me how to get into that game, girl, I could use it. Might almost be worth it to kill mine if there was any money in it.”

“That isn’t funny,” Brooke says because she feels obligated.

“You laughed.”

(Vanessa’s right.)

“Come inside, it’s freezing,” Brooke says eventually, as she almost starts shivering.

Brooke unlocks the front door and she can’t help but watch Vanessa’s expression as she gazes up at the vaulted ceilings, the modern furniture, the piece of abstract art that takes up nearly an entire wall. Brooke is proud of this space; she picked a lot of the decor out herself.

“Damn,” Vanessa breathes, and the corner of Brooke’s mouth turns up.

Brooke sets down her things, hangs Vanessa’s coat by the door, and retrieves the bottle of scotch off the high shelf of the wet bar. Jason’s father had gotten it for him as a gift when he became the CEO of the bank, and it had sat completely undisturbed for the three years since then. Twisting off the top feels like the most delicious kind of fuck you. 

“There’s no ghost in here,” Vanessa says unprompted as she settles into the large armchair in the living room that exaggerates just how small she is. “I can see how you think there’s one, being in this big empty house all by yourself, but I think you’re safe.”

“You can tell?” Brooke carefully pours a small amount of scotch into two glasses.

“Sometimes, yeah.” Vanessa’s eyes are still darting between the ceiling, the large open kitchen, and the miscellania in the glass display cases. “The energy in here is weird as hell, but you probably just need to sage it.”

“Noted,” Brooke says as she hands Vanessa a glass and settles into the couch next to her.

They clink the glasses together, a silent cheers, before finally taking a sip. It’s impossibly smooth liquor, with just a bit of bite at the end, which Brooke wholeheartedly respects. She’s no dark liquor aficionado, but she’s pretty sure it tastes like a late-summer bonfire with notes of vindication.

“I don’t know shit about scotch, but god this is fancy,” Vanessa says as she swirls the amber liquid in her glass. “Good riddance to your man.”

“Good riddance,” Brooke says quietly. She remembers briefly the other two scotch glasses from this set shattering against the wall inches from her head, and takes another sip. It’s retribution. It’s another light revenge. “And fuck him.”

“Fuck him,” Vanessa agrees. She gives Brooke the softest knowing smile, and Brooke isn’t sure if it’s the scotch or just Vanessa, but she feels some kind of warmth spread through her chest.

“You have an asshole boyfriend,” Brooke says after a moment. It’s a statement, not a question.

“You remembered that.” Also not a question. “His name is Victor.”

“How bad is it?” Brooke asks. For a second she worries it’s too far, but she waits.

Vanessa takes another sip, thinking it over. “It’s not that bad. Really, it’s not. Most days it’s good, he buys me nice things and he’s sweet.” She sighs. “But he’s got this temper, you know? And he gets jealous over stupid shit. But no, he just screams and throws shit at the wall, and I get right out of there and go wait it out at one of my girls’ places. And then he begs me to come back, and then he treats me like a queen.” Vanessa looks at the ceiling, bites her lip. “Never lasts, though.”

Brooke just nods. It sounds too familiar. Eerily familiar. Vanessa’s jaw is tight, and Brooke can see just how strong she is in that moment. She wants to scoop Vanessa out of there, this earlier version of herself, and help her get out of it before it gets worse. But she knows it’s not that simple.

“He never hits me, and god if he did, it’d be the last thing he does, I swear.”

“That’s the difference,” Brooke doesn’t realize she says out loud.

“What?”

“Jason was all of those things, plus the hitting.”

“Oh.” Vanessa looks at the ground and back up. “I’m sorry.”

“Good riddance,” Brooke echoes, shrugs, and takes another drink.

“How did you do it?”

“Do what?” Brooke’s glass clinks against the metal side table.

“If we’re getting real personal. How did you kill him? Tell me.”

Brooke sighs, takes a moment. “He was allergic to figs,” she says simply. She almost laughs at how strange an answer it is, with these words that she’s never actually formed into sentences before. “Very allergic to figs. And I baked some fig pastries, he found them in the fridge, and he didn’t check. And that was it.”

Vanessa’s jaw is actually hanging open. “Shit, that’s--”

“Complicated?”

“I was gonna say spooky as fuck, but that works too, yeah.”

“So it really just looks like an accident. It was an accident, honestly. He’s just an idiot, at the end of the day. So yeah. That’s how.”

“Damn. And now you can do whatever you want,” Vanessa says, looking frankly amazed.

“You’re not taking notes, are you?”

“No, god no, I’d be out of there before it came to that. There’s nothing that serious keeping me with him.”

Brooke almost says _I said that too_. But she lets it go.

Brooke wishes that she could actually do whatever she wants, but that’s complicated too, what with the ghosts-that-aren’t-ghosts creeping around her home. She’s still not sure what she wants, what she’s supposed to want, what it feels like to want _for_ something instead of just wanting to get away.

“Say you left your boyfriend. Victor,” Brooke asks. “Say you could do whatever you want. What would you do?”

Vanessa smiles that same whole-face smile that already feels familiar. “I’d leave. I’d get in my car and drive until I found a place where I wanted to be. And I’d start over. Maybe somewhere by the water. Maybe doing something with animals. And I’d have a big kitchen and a lot of light and a garden. Yeah, that’s what I want.”

 _A garden._ Tomatoes for homemade pico de gallo, a rainbow of bell peppers, maybe even some strawberries. Something to watch after, something to care for. She could get behind that.

Vanessa is almost down to the bottom of her glass, and Brooke notices.

“Another?” Brooke asks.

“No, I should get going actually.” She checks the time on her phone. “ _Fuck_ , how is it already one in the morning? And I have to work tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m sorry I kept you.” Brooke hadn’t been paying attention to the time, and barely even felt tired. “Are you all right getting home? Is that going to be safe for you?” Brooke is ready to offer her guest bedroom in a heartbeat.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine, he’ll be asleep anyway.” Vanessa kicks back the rest of her scotch, bats her eyes rapidly as she swallows. “And if he gets jealous later, I’ll tell him there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Right,” Brooke says without thinking.

“Because there’s nothing to worry about, right?”

And then there’s a moment. Vanessa’s gaze is locked in on her, and the seriousness of the question settles in the air. Something inside Brooke lurches, and suddenly she feels like she’s 20 and drunk at a college party, swaddled in the allure of breaking the rules and accepting an unlikely invitation. _Oh_.

(She could kiss her. She could lean over the arm of the couch, wrap those curls around her fingers, catch those too-expectant lips with her own. And it wouldn’t feel too out of place, because Vanessa is young and gorgeous and seems to conduct electricity. She feels it sparkling right now on the back of her neck, urging her forward, drawing her in, and fuck it she might just go for--)

Brooke’s brain catches up with her body, context and the words Vanessa had just said snap into place, and Brooke sits back two inches in her chair.

“Right,” she repeats. She stalled too long to pass it off casually. Vanessa doesn’t flinch.

“Well. Thank you for the drinks.” Vanessa smiles that same brilliant smile as she pushes her hair over her shoulder and smooths her skirt. “Let’s do this again.”

Brooke is certain she imagined it. She plays that split second back in her mind as Vanessa pulls on her coat, _because there’s nothing to worry about, right_ ringing in her ears. But no, she had to be joking, they’re drunk, it’s late, Vanessa’s got a boyfriend and Brooke’s recently murdered husband probably hasn’t even started decomposing. There’s no way.

(She could have kissed her.)

“You’re walking?” Brooke finally manages.

“Uber.” Vanessa holds up her phone to show her the app. “Arriving soon.”

“Let me give you my number, and you can text me when you get home safe.” Brooke is feeling confused but also bold, so when Vanessa hands over her phone, she adds an emoji next to her contact name. A little black heart. Vanessa smiles when she sees it.

“Goodnight, Vanessa.”

“Goodnight, Brooke.”

Vanessa hesitates before turning to go, then stands on her tip toes and presses a kiss high on Brooke’s cheek. Could just be a goodbye. Could be something more. Brooke doesn’t know, because Vanessa has disappeared toward the car waiting in front of her home with the blinkers on before Brooke can ask any questions.

The door clicks shut. Brooke sits back down, taking the rest of the scotch in her glass like it’s a shot. She rubs the back of her neck, and looks down at her hand, half expecting the lingering sparks to come away as glitter. There’s nothing.

Vanessa texts her a simple _got home safe!_ about twenty minutes later, and Brooke responds with another _goodnight!_ Vanessa texts back a black heart, and Brooke stares at it for what is probably a little too long.

Brooke settles into her bed warm and drunk and spinning for too many reasons, most of which she can’t put words to. The house doesn’t creak tonight.


	3. cristalito roto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Brooke catches feelings and Vanessa sleeps over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> buckle up.
> 
> (domestic violence is more explicit in this chapter but this is as bad as it gets, I promise)

And just like that, Brooke has a friend.

Vanessa texts her a different cat video pretty much every day, and Brooke maybe-too-eagerly wipes the sleep out of her eyes to watch them on the mornings when she wakes up to a message from Vanessa on her phone.  Brooke buys her more drinks (and if there’s a power dynamic there, they don’t acknowledge it) and over the course of a few weeks they finish Jason’s bottle of scotch. Stories flow out of them like water: Vanessa talks about her own short-lived aspirations of a dancing career, Brooke complains about her vapid yoga teacher, and they both gush about their resilient mothers. There’s never a lull, even for a second. Vanessa thanks her for a reason to get out of her house.

Vanessa invites her out and Brooke meets Silky and A’keria, her best friends and coworkers from the dress store. They’re loud and bright and boy they can _drink_ , and even as the dancefloor is spinning Brooke and Vanessa make sure to keep an eye on each other, pull each other away from too-handsy men. They dance until the lights come on at 3 a.m.

And really, they’re just friends.

(Just friends, she reminds herself, when Vanessa shows up at her house wearing a short green dress and Brooke has to work hard to not stare at her legs and the cut of the muscle in her thigh. Just friends, she knows to think, every time Vanessa is on the phone with her boyfriend. Just friends, when Vanessa comes over for brunch and perches on her countertop while she watches Brooke make puff pastry by hand. Just friends, when Vanessa reaches under the table to set her hand on Brooke’s knee and sparks shoot down her leg again. Absolutely just friends.)

Brooke killed her husband a month ago. She’s got other intrusive thoughts to worry about.

And yet, it gets easier. Brooke sages the house like Vanessa told her, adores the lingering smell, and the shadows stop moving out of the corner of her eye. The kitchen becomes hers again. She stops walking around the spot where his body fell and dances to music she hasn’t listened to since high school while she cooks dinner.

She makes plans for a garden. It’s something she wants. She’d always loved the green space in the backyard, fighting tooth and nail to prevent Jason from turning it into a pool, but a garden could really do it justice. She hires someone professional to do it, and they dig into the red clay earth to set up better soil and drainage. She stares into the shallow ditch in her backyard expectantly, because she’s pretty sure there’s a promise somewhere in there.

“I killed him,” she says one night to an empty room. No _might have_ , no _think I maybe_. She’s starting to own it. It’s a fact, and every day she goes without a bruise on her skin (she’s at 47) makes her feel a little less scared of that reality.

Nina says she looks taller. Brooke lilts between the cupboards as she’s unpacking her groceries, and that’s when Nina starts to notice something’s actually different.

“You’re fucking somebody, aren’t you?” Nina leans against Brooke’s counter like she already knows the answer.

“No, I’m not.” Brooke feels her face threaten to flush and she turns away before Nina can catch it, busying herself with needlessly rearranging the nuts and raisins.

“Come on. What’s his name?”

Brooke throws on a very performatively serious face. “There’s nobody-" 

“What’s _her_ name?” Nina cuts her off.

Brooke stops putting away her groceries to give Nina a long glare. She regrets ever telling Nina about a whirlwind fling and inexplicably massive heartbreak over an Icelandic ballerina one night when she was drunk and spewing unfiltered feelings. And Nina sees right through her now, always does, and Brooke rolls her eyes and relents. Partially.

“You’re the one who told me to make a friend. So I did. Her name’s Vanessa. She lives with her boyfriend, and we hang out. That’s it." 

“And you like her.”

“I enjoy her company. We’re _friends_.”

Nina narrows her eyes, and Brooke worries for a moment that she can somehow read her mind. “And where did you meet?”

Brooke hesitates, Nina catches it. “At a bar.” Brooke thinks she should really work on being a better liar. 

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Nina says, “and I’m going to find out what it is.” Brooke has every reason to believe that she will.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Brooke can’t look at her, so she tears into the package of lemons in her bag and starts putting them into her hanging fruit basket.

“You’re a terrible secret-keeper, Brooke.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

If only she knew. Brooke adds a new item to the list of things she’s keeping from Nina.

\--

Vanessa falls asleep on Brooke’s couch a little before midnight on a Wednesday with an episode of _Parks & Recreation_ playing softly on the TV. Brooke has this moment bookmarked in her memory for two reasons:

  1. Vanessa is even beautiful when she’s sleeping. She’s got this kind of serenity and stillness that Brooke never finds in her always-expressive face during the day. Her collarbone shifts as she steadily breathes. Brooke wants to smack herself for focusing in on this.


  1. Brooke will shortly realize that if Vanessa had stayed awake, or if Brooke had just woken her up and gotten her home, every second of chaos and fear they were to endure in the coming days could have been avoided. It’s something of a morbid turning point.



Anyway.

Vanessa comes over to Brooke’s for dinner and brings a pasta dish she baked at home. Brooke tosses a salad with caramelized brussels sprouts and dried apricots. They eat and chat about Vanessa’s most recent dress heist from her work, this time for A’keria, and the thrill of walking past her boss all smiles with the dress balled up in her drawstring bag.

They had originally wanted to find a movie to watch, but Brooke insists on bingeing a few episodes of _Parks & Rec _when Vanessa says she’s never seen it. They start in the middle of a season, with some of Brooke’s favorite episodes, and she smiles as she catches Vanessa chucking out of the corner of her eye. But after what she thinks is four (and is actually six) episodes, Vanessa is slumped to the side of the couch, eyes lightly shut, fast asleep in the glow of the television.

Brooke watches her for probably what is longer than is normal. It’s longer than is friendly, that’s for sure, but she’s definitely not ready to deal with that. But after a moment she makes the decision (a conscious decision, she will remind herself later) to get up and grab her a blanket and pillow, to help her get comfy, to let her stay as long as she wants. Her shoes are already off, and her dress doesn’t seem like the most comfortable thing to be sleeping in, but Brooke manages to adjust her so her head is down on the pillow and her shoulders are covered by the blanket. She turns off the screen and watches as Vanessa curls into the covers.

(She could run the pad of her thumb over Vanessa’s smooth cheekbones. She could press a kiss to her temple, whisper _goodnight_ , wonder if she heard. Vanessa would probably be warm, with a body temperature a few degrees higher than most humans, a furnace, a generator. As much as Brooke wants to touch, she doesn’t. She really, really thinks about it, though.)

She leaves the hall light on, in case Vanessa gets up. She leaves the door to her bedroom cracked, because Vanessa might need her in the night. And maybe she falls asleep thinking about what that might look like. Maybe.

\--

“Fuck!”

Brooke stirs in the morning as she hears a voice, a muffled shout, and what sounds like something heavy thudding against the carpet in the living room. She pulls the throw blanket over her shoulders and steps out of her room to lean against hallway door frame.

Vanessa is hobbling around with one heel on and turning over couch cushions. She notices Brooke and draws in a breath. “What time is it? Can’t find my damn phone.”

“Um,” Brooke peers at the oven clock. “Almost nine-thirty."

“Fuck. I’m gonna be late for work.” Vanessa sighs with relief when she finally uncovers her phone. “Can you drive me?”

“Yeah, of course.” Brooke grabs Vanessa’s other shoe from over by the door and brings it to her. She would almost find Vanessa stumbling around in the morning almost endearing if she didn’t look so legitimately uneasy.

“I shouldn’t have stayed here last night.” Vanessa’s tone is serious, which wakes Brooke up a bit more. “He’s gonna be so pissed I didn’t come home.”

They don’t talk about Victor much. Vanessa doesn’t bring it up, Brooke doesn’t pry, as she figures Vanessa would prefer an escape from that world. So it’s jarring. Usually Vanessa is unshakably carefree, but Brooke can feel the crease in her eyebrows and she’s drained of her usual vibrance, so Brooke knows this is something to worry about.

“All right. I’ll get dressed. Okay.”

She tosses on sweats quickly, trying to wipe the unwelcome sleepiness out of her eyes as she tries to make her brain catch up with her body. They hop into Brooke’s car, and Vanessa is typing furiously on her phone in the passenger seat as they drive, silent except for the occasional quiet exasperated click of her tongue.

“What’s up?” Brooke asks after Vanessa turns her phone upside down on the dashboard in frustration.

“He’s losing it. Over nothing.”

“I’m so sorry, I should have woken you--”

“It’s not you. There’s nothing to be mad about, it’s literally nothing, and he’s acting like I’ve got a secret family or some shit.”

 _Because there’s nothing to worry about, right?_  

It’s not nothing. She can’t tell if Vanessa knows that. But they’re rapidly approaching a boiling point and Brooke knows sooner rather than later she’s going to have to address it.

“Are you going to be all right after work?” Brooke asks evasively instead.

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Brooke doesn’t believe her for a second, but she doesn’t want to make this feel any worse than it already is, so she leaves it.

She drops Vanessa off in front of the dress boutique right on time for her shift, and Brooke is comforted that she seems to relax just a little.

“Thank you. Seriously.” Vanessa leans in through the car window to lock into her gaze.

“You’ll text me?”

“I will. And don’t worry, it’s gonna get sorted out. You seem more worried than I do!”

Vanessa laughs, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, so Brooke isn’t sure that that’s true.

\--

V: _a’keria noticed i’m wearing the same dress as yesterday and now she thinks we’re fucking_

V: _so sorry for that in advance_

B: _lol could you imagine!_

Maybe Brooke can’t un-make the choices she made last night, but she sure can backpedal. She tries not to stare at that text for too long. She tries not to think about Vanessa. She folds the blanket on the couch and puts it back in the closet without a second thought. She’s making Vanessa’s world harder, and it’s the last thing she wants. So she resolves to dial it down.

She doesn’t hear from Vanessa much more for the rest of the day, and Brooke thinks she’s just not looking at her phone as often. It makes sense. No news is good news, she tells herself for some reason. Plus, the one text she got was a joke, which puts her a bit more at ease. But something feels off. She knows Vanessa gets off work at six, but she goes through her evening without a single text. She tries not to worry, but that isn’t her strong suit.

Just as she’s settling in under the covers a little after 11, her phone lights up.

V: _hey can I come over tonight?_

B: _i was about to go to bed, actually_

B: _but tomorrow?_

Once Brooke is enveloped in her comforter cocoon, it’s hard to drag her out. Plus, distance. Backpedaling. She’s not expecting the response.

V: _Actually_

V: _I can’t stay here tonight_

V: _And Silky and A’keria aren’t texting me back_

V: _And things got bad_

V: _I need to get out of here I think_

Brooke’s stomach plummets and she’s throwing on clothes blindly for the second time that day.

B: _yes_

B: _of course_

B: _be there in 20_

The key is in the ignition of her car and she doesn’t remember walking out there, and she’s about to back out of her garage when she checks her phone one more time. 

V: _don’t you live 30 min away?_

B: _yep_

Brooke runs a couple lights and makes it in fifteen.

She’s been to Vanessa’s place before, picking her up or dropping her off, but she’s never been inside before. She and Victor live on the top floor of a duplex, and she climbs the rickety wooden stairs to the entrance off the deck. _Come inside and back down the hallway,_ Vanessa had texted her. _I’m not sure I can come out of this room to get you_. Brooke steels herself and tries not to let her imagination run wild over what that possibly means.

Brooke shivers as the door squeaks shut behind her. She turns quickly but quietly to try and navigate the dark kitchen and find Vanessa when she catches sight of Victor. He’s sitting in the adjoined room lit only by a rapidly flickering TV screen. It’s eerie. If he sees her, he doesn’t acknowledge her, and she doesn’t give him much of a chance as she steps softly into the hallway.

Brooke feels the same icy drip down her back from when she thought her house was haunted, but she doesn’t pause to shudder. Brooke isn’t quite sure what she’s walking into, and she knows it’s bad, but even then she doesn’t doubt for a second the way her body seems to carry itself towards Vanessa, to do anything to make sure she’s safe.

Brooke drums her fingernails on the thin, closed door. “Hey,” she says softly, “it’s me.”

The door opens just a crack, then all the way, and Brooke steps inside. The room is a wreck, with dresser drawers thrown open and a duffel bag and a suitcase on the bed exploding with fabrics and things that seem to have been hastily stuffed inside. But then she turns to see Vanessa, closing the door and relocking it with a barely perceptible click, and Brooke freezes.

Vanessa has a black eye. Vanessa has a cut across her cheek.

“Fuck,” Brooke whispers. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Figured you were probably freaked out enough.” Vanessa winces as she smiles. Like nothing’s wrong.

“He did this?”

“He did _this_ because I didn’t come home last night.” She points to the bruise darkening around her left eye. “And then this when I said I was leaving.” The cut on her cheek isn’t pretty, won’t heal well, but it looks like she’s been dabbing it with a cloth to keep the bleeding down. “So I’m definitely leaving. Right now.”

Brooke is at a loss for what to do. She’s ready to give her water and a blanket and a distraction, just like Nina would offer her the nights she had to stay over. But that’s not the same kind of girl that’s standing in front of her right now. Vanessa’s got fire in her eyes, a tight jaw, and she looks angry enough to climb out a second story window if she has to. 

“I’m so sorry, this is-- I should have--”

“Brooke, no, it’s not your fault. Don’t even start with that.” Vanessa’s voice is the most confident and self-aware sound Brooke’s heard in her life. “It’s not your fault, or mine, it’s _his_.”

(Vanessa is like a smooth rock in river full of rapids. She’s glimmering like a piece of sea glass hidden in the sand. She stands resolute against a current that threatens to shift and transform her, and it’s nothing short of sublime.)

Brooke’s used to storing blame in the space in between her shoulders, a space she always struggled to loosen even when she was dancing, even before she was with Jason. But maybe it doesn’t always belong there.

“It is,” she agrees. “It is his fault.”

“Good. Now help me zip this shit.”

Brooke helps her wrestle her suitcase shut, somehow managing to cram the rest of Vanessa’s unfolded clothes inside of it. She sighs, tosses the duffel bag over her shoulder, and Brooke takes the heavy suitcase by its handle, not trusting the low grind of the wheels.

They plan to move quick, to get out the door and down the stairs and into Brooke’s car before Victor can get off the couch, but these things never seem to go to plan. Vanessa is halfway out the door to the porch when the floorboards behind them creak.

“No. You aren’t leaving.” It’s a low voice from the living room.

Vanessa stops in the doorway and turns. “It’s over, Victor.”

He’s smaller than Brooke imagined. Paler, washed out. But solidly there, right in front of them. Jason would only get violent when he was drunk, but Victor seems perfectly sober which is all the more terrifying.

“You don’t get to just decide that,” he starts, “you don’t get to just--”

“I can do what I want.” Vanessa steps forward, back into the kitchen, back into harm’s way like she knows exactly what she’s doing. Brooke wants to grab Vanessa’s arm, lead her out the door, deescalate the situation, but she can’t quite move, can’t quite speak, can only watch the lighted fuse creep closer to set off a bomb.

“And who the fuck is this?” Victor gestures towards Brooke, pointed finger, and she shifts back.

“Nobody.”

“Is this who you’re staying with? You’re cheating on me with some blonde bitch?”

Vanessa snaps, and Brooke can see all of the rage in her small body ready to bubble out. “I swear to god, you’re gonna burn in hell--”

Victor raises a flat palm at Vanessa, and then everything moves too fast for Brooke to think. She just acts.

Brooke steps into the line of fire. She’s got her hands around Victor’s arm, pulling him back harder than what she thought she was capable. He’s clearly caught off guard too, and he briefly loses his footing. But he’s also stronger than he looks, and his hands rain down hard against her skin. Vanessa’s yelling, but the words don’t quite reach Brooke’s ears. She’d like for it to feel good to fight back, but truthfully, it’s all too much.

When Victor throws Brooke into the spice rack, in a brief moment of clarity she notes the criminally underused quantity of cardamom that Vanessa has. Then she feels the sharp crack of her head against the corner of the shelving unit, hears the small plastic canisters raining down around her, and feels the sharp pain radiate through her skull. _Fuck_.

And then he’s holding something, a rolling pin maybe, standing over her and silhouetted by the too-bright fluorescent light from the ceiling. She brings up an arm over her head, looks away, but then there’s a thud different than the one she was expecting as whatever he’s holding drops to the linoleum tile.

He’s choking. Gurgling. His body buckles, falls to the side against the refrigerator, and a patch of blood starts to spread across his chest.

Brooke looks up to see Vanessa, holding a carving knife now coated in blood, frozen with total horror in her eyes.

“Oh,” Brooke says. “Oh wow.”


	4. no voy perder ni un minuto en volver a pensarte

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nina West is implicated in a murder because sometimes it’s challenging, logistically, to hide a body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You thought the last chapter was the chapter where everything Happens, think again. I’m about to put Nina through hell, and I promise I will make it up to her later. I briefly considered splitting this into two chapters, but I think it’s important it all stays together as one mega-chapter. So here’s 5.4k. Eat up. 
> 
> Meggie is sincerely the best beta I could ask for. Thank you for sharing my enthusiasm for this fic and putting up with my frequent late night need for affirmation, ily. Thank you to everyone who has left comments and lit a little typing fire under my fingers, and a big hug to the Branjie Avengers for their nonsense, chaos, and kindness.

Brooke does the dishes.

Vanessa’s got a pile of them already sitting in the sink, so when she goes to rinse the blood off the knife, it only makes sense to finish the rest of them. That, and she needs something to do with her hands.

Vanessa’s crouched on the floor next to the body. She’s got blood on her skin, her dress, and Brooke isn’t quite sure how it got there. She’s not thinking about that at the moment, just the dishes.

He bled out fast. Vanessa must have good aim. It was a small mercy, for all of them, probably.

Brooke’s got the pasta colander balanced precariously on a tower of glasses to dry. She wipes down the sink. Vanessa’s dish soap smells like lavender.  But then her hands are empty, dry, and she breathes audibly into the icy, frozen scene in front of her. 

“You don’t have to stay,” Vanessa says finally, barely turning away from the body.

“What?”

“You don’t have to stay. Or like wait with me. I won’t say there was anybody else here, I’ll make something up, I can probably still get some kind of self-defense thing--”

“Slow down; wait for what?”

“The police, the ambulance, I don’t know. Who did you call?”

Vanessa’s voice carries the sharpest edge and Brooke isn’t sure what to do with it, how to quell it. Maybe that’s not possible. But then Vanessa’s face softens, she lets out a stuttering sigh, and Brooke’s stomach twists with how terrifyingly defeated she looks. That, and there’s a long smudged line of red from the corner of her eye.

“Did you touch your face?” Brooke asks.

“Yeah, why, is there--?” 

“Yeah.”

“Can you get it?”

Brooke pulls the damp towel from where it’s looped around the cabinet handle and kneels on the ground next to Vanessa. It’s not Vanessa’s blood, it’s Victor’s, as the cut on Vanessa’s face is on the other side. Brooke takes care not to bump it as she cups Vanessa’s jaw tenderly, holds her steady while she wipes the dried blood away.

“There.” Brooke taps Vanessa’s chin with her fingers. She tries to smile. It’s too familiar, or just familiar enough. “You’re pretty again.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Vanessa says for the third time.

(Brooke considers it for approximately one second. If she leaves now, she can hole up in her big house and dissociate while the world turns on without her for as long as she wants. She doesn’t deserve that option, though, and Vanessa doesn’t deserve it either. Most pressingly, Brooke realizes, if Vanessa keeps thinking like this, then she doesn’t stand a chance without her.)

“I’m not leaving.” Brooke ghosts her thumb over Vanessa’s cheek. “You’re not doing this alone.”

Vanessa breaks for just a second, turns her face into Brooke’s hand and shudders. Brooke wants to pull her close, hold her while she cries, think through the perfect solution while Vanessa rests and heals, but the moment is over too quickly. Vanessa leaves the hurt and the panic and the fear in the palm of Brooke’s hand, and looks up at her with clearer eyes.

“Fuck. All right. Then what are we going to do?”

They could call the cops. They could do this the right way. But Brooke, perhaps unfortunately, has watched too many true crime shows to think that’s the only option. Vanessa reads her mind a little.

“We can’t… No cops. He has friends who are cops. _Had_ , fuck.” Vanessa starts to fix her hair but stops when it gets stuck where the blood is still drying on her hands. “We can’t just… This doesn’t look good.”

It doesn’t. Two women with recently dead partners, less than mysterious circumstances on the second one, and not enough people to believe they were acting in self-defense. Brooke calculates. There’s an escape route, and it isn’t pretty, but it might be the only possible way out for either of them.

“Well.” Brooke bites her lip, and takes a long serious look at the body face down on the kitchen floor. “Let’s clean it up.”

Brooke can shut off her heart when she needs to. She’s certainly got a tendency to panic, but when it’s most necessary she can build a wall of ice around the parts of her that are eager to spiral. And that’s what she does, right now, to stomach this. She gives herself tasks, boxes to check, all things she can do without thinking too much.

She finds trash bags underneath the sink and duct tape in the junk drawer. The body is still limp, his muscles not yet stiffened and cold, and Brooke lifts him out of the pool of blood and guides him into the open bag Vanessa is holding. It takes two to cover him, top and bottom, but as they wrap it in tape it feels like not quite enough, so they double, triple, quadruple bag the body. She’s not sure what’s more gruesome, the body with the stab wound or the anonymous human shaped trash bag lump next to the puddle of blood.

They scrub. Vanessa fills a bucket with impossibly hot water and lavender all-purpose soap, and Brooke is grateful she can focus on how much her hands burn instead of dwelling on the truly impressive quantity of blood a human body can hold. Vanessa only has white dish towels, which are soon stained a deep red like the water in the bucket. She surveys their work. It’s clean, hopefully imperceptibly so. She breathes in the lavender, unable to find the rusty scent of blood she knows is lingering underneath it.

“Oh, wait,” Vanessa says as she crouches down next to the fridge and wipes away hidden streak of blood. “There. Better.”

Vanessa pulls a big party cooler out of a back room. _Stores up to 200 beers!_ a too-cheery sticker on the side reads. And that will have to be good enough. They manage to fold the trash bag lump so it will fit, and maybe the top layer tears a bit, but the finality of the thunk of the lid as it seals is enough to make her forget about that.

“Should we use ice? Do you have ice?”

“Um.” Vanessa opens her freezer and peeks around. “I have ice cream?”

Brooke bookmarks that. “No, no ice then, maybe we just…” Brooke is at the bottom of her to-do list. And she can’t stop staring at the cooler, now so inconspicuous in the sparkling clean kitchen, that she finds herself at a loss. 

“What are we going to do with it?” Vanessa asks.

“Hide it, I guess.” She knows the answer has to be more detailed than that, but Vanessa just nods.

Okay. Well. If there’s a “right way” to dispose of a body, she isn’t aware of it. She thinks of sensationalist news stories, bodies stuffed in barrels in the woods, freezers with sawed off limbs preserved for years, things that get found and traced and people who spend the rest of their lives in jail. And they’re no professionals, forensic science is spookily precise, so this is bound to not go well.

“My car,” Brooke remembers. “It’s not going to fit that.” Her small coupe would have barely had enough room for Vanessa’s bags. She tries to drum up a vague outline of this part of town. There’s no forest, no treeline, no river, nowhere private enough they could carry it-- 

“People will be out, it’s probably too heavy to carry far…” Vanessa muses, shakes her head.

So. Brooke addresses this problem the way she solves a disproportionate number of her problems. She calls Nina, who picks up on the third ring.

“Hi! Hey! It’s past midnight and, you may have forgotten, I have children who are asleep. What’s going on?” Despite her sarcasm Nina’s tone still feels dissonantly chipper.

“Can you do me a favor? A big favor that I will owe you for for the rest of my life?”

“You already owe me for the rest of your life.”

“Okay, into the next generation then. We need to borrow your car. I mean _I_ need to--” Brooke stops. She breathes. Enough truth to be believable, but not so much that Nina will hang up on her. “Vanessa needs to move a cooler, and my car isn’t big enough. And we were wondering if we could borrow your van.”

“Vanessa needs to move a cooler at midnight on a Thursday?”

“It’s for a work party.” She doesn’t hesitate, the lie comes to her and she says it and tries to ignore Vanessa grimacing in the background. “Tomorrow. It’s just drinks and stuff, and she doesn’t have a car.”

Brooke hears Nina sigh on the other end of the line. She can almost see Nina’s face, the way she would roll her lips between her teeth whenever she went against her better judgement to care for Brooke. 

“Listen, Jon’s away on business and I can’t leave the girls alone. But tomorrow morning? After I drop them off at school? Is that okay?”

“Sure.” Brooke makes a snap decision. “Yes, tomorrow. I’ll text you her address.”

“Is everything okay, Brooke?” Nina, unwaveringly patient and concerned, asks.

( _No, I’ve willingly implicated myself in a murder. No, I don’t know how to hide a body and there’s quite a lot riding on that right now. No, my heart is pulling me directly into catastrophe and I’m too hung up on this woman who needs me to work my way out on my own._ )

“Yeah, it’s fine.” This lie comes easy too, but it’s one she tells Nina often.

Brooke wishes Nina goodnight, tells her she loves her, and hangs up.

Vanessa’s got her arms crossed, leaning against the sink, worry in her eyes. “Now we have to take it to my work tomorrow.”

“Shit, I didn’t even think--”

“No, wait, maybe this could work. The store is like a block from the river. We could throw it off the bridge? People do that kind of shit, right?”

“In the middle of the day?”

“Well, okay, it’s the only idea we have right now and I don’t think it’s too bad--”

“Right, sorry. Sure, a bridge, the river, that makes sense.” Brooke reaches up to rub her temples, and hisses at the lingering pain in her arm where he grabbed her. “Sorry, I can hardly think.”

“Me either.” Vanessa pushes herself off the laminate countertop, and then her arms are snaking around Brooke’s good arm, her fingers interlacing with Brooke’s. Brooke feels a warm hum travel up her arm, settle into her shoulder as she feels it relax for the first time since stepping into Vanessa’s home. “How do people do this?”

It shouldn’t be allowed. Brooke shouldn’t get to feel held, safe, comfortable. And she doesn’t, not fully, but Vanessa’s hand tight against her own makes her believe that perhaps there might be a way out of this. It makes her want a way out of this. She knows it’s wrong, but then again, there’s no script.  

“People don’t do this,” she answers simply.

“Are you going home tonight?” Vanessa asks with a small voice against her shoulder.

“No, I--” ( _Said I wouldn’t leave you. Don’t want to be alone. Don’t want you to be alone_ ). “No.”

Vanessa squeezes her hand, smiles against Brooke’s t-shirt. It’s not the brilliant Vanessa smile she’s used to, but it’s more than she expects. “Good. Okay. I’ll set you up in the guest room.” Vanessa pulls back, looks at her, and scrunches her eyebrows. “What’s on your shirt?”

“Blood,” Brooke answers without looking.

“No, the design, are those… chili fries?”

She had forgotten what shirt she had thrown on on the way over here, may not have even been conscious of it in the first place, but looking down now she half wants to laugh, half wants to cry. It’s an old pajama shirt she must have gotten in high school. It’s got a diagram of proper poutine assembly, and the cheese curds have smiley faces on them. The bottom half is stained, massively and irreparably.

“It’s poutine.”

“Who?”

“It’s a Canadian food, it’s…”

Vanessa narrows her eyes suspiciously. For a second Brooke forgets where they are, _when_ they are, and she feels a wide smile spread across her face at the familiarity of Vanessa’s irritated side eye.

Vanessa can’t keep a her serious face long either. She lifts her chin, clicks her tongue. “Well, whatever it is, we gotta burn it now.”

Vanessa finds a clean replacement shirt for Brooke to sleep in. It’s roomy, plain, soft, and it smells like her. The guest room looks like something pulled from a catalog, pristinely made up and completely unused.

Brooke bites her lip as Vanessa sighs in the doorway. “All right. Well. Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow,” Brooke agrees.

There’s no illusion that this has been or will become a good night so they don’t say it. But Vanessa grabs her hand, squeezes it firmly, before disappearing down the hall. Brooke flexes her fingers and savors the memory of the pressure.

There’s still blood on her hands (and her knees, and apparently somehow in her hair) so Brooke takes a shower. She turns the temperature all the way up and hopes it helps her forget about what she’s washing away just like it had in the kitchen. Showers have always been her place to reflect, though, a moment of peace. Hot water rolls off of her forehead. She knows where she is. She knows what they’ve done. For a moment the panic drifts away from the facts and she can look at them plainly, scientifically. Were there alternatives, really? Yes, she remembers as she struggles to lift her arm above her shoulder, there were alternatives, which may have resulted in even more blood to clean up. It doesn’t sit easily, she can’t wedge it into the prefigured slots of her moral compass, but there it is.

She tries to towel-dry her hair with little success, and she knows it will be a rat’s nest tomorrow. There’s a green bruise forming around her temple, and she’ll have to think up something to tell Nina tomorrow, she realizes. She wraps herself in Vanessa’s shirt, tries to settle in.

Brooke pulls the covers up over her shoulders, trying to form a cocoon, but she realizes that shutting her eyes is not an option. It was probably foolish to think that she would sleep at all tonight. The day comes back in flashes of too-fresh images, and she can’t help but flinch. Blood on the ground, and the shirt, and Vanessa’s face, a rolling pin, the flicker of the television, the purple around Vanessa’s eye, sober fury, cool blue fear, cardamom, duct tape, ice cream. A shattered glass from a year ago makes it into the montage, she’s surprised. She opens her eyes, gives up on sleep, stares at the whirring ceiling fan and counts its rotations.

So it’s magic, really, when a knock comes on her door.

Vanessa opens it incrementally, stepping just inside. Her hair lays flat when it’s wet, Brooke notes. She’s wearing a huge white shirt that’s thin enough so Brooke can just barely make out the outline of her darker skin underneath. She hovers, hand still on the doorknob.

“I can’t sleep,” she says softly.

“I can’t either.”

“That bedroom, I can’t sleep in there, and it’s even worse to lay out on the couch with him in the fucking cooler right there and I don’t know how I’m gonna--”

“Hey.” Brooke cuts her off, sits up, pulls back the covers. “Come here.”

It’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.

Vanessa doesn’t give her space, presses right up against her. There’s no pretense, no feigned nervous distance. It’s like she knows she’s going to end up there anyway, and there’s no point in wasting time. Vanessa’s arms curl around Brooke’s waist, hands nestling just under her shirt, smooth and sure along her spine. She’s warmer than Brooke could have possibly imagined.

Brooke closes her eyes and gets another quick flash, and this time it’s the blood running down the kitchen drain as she washed off the knife. She shivers, and Vanessa pulls her closer. It’s too much and it’s all she can hope for.

“Is this wrong?” she finally asks.

“Yes,” Vanessa says into Brooke’s collarbone. “But I need it.”

So Brooke leans into it. She feels herself soften and sink into Vanessa’s touch, impossibly gentle and entirely undeserved. But then really, there’s no preordained script, there’s no set right or wrong, there’s only feelings in a moment, snap judgements, choices that have to be good enough. Running her fingers down Vanessa’s spine is certainly a dangerous choice, but what isn’t these days? Brooke leaps; she does it anyway. Vanessa’s hair smells like coconut.

Gently, Vanessa brings a hand up to her face, smoothing her fingertips over the tender corner of Brooke’s forehead where it collided with the shelving unit.

“Are you hurt bad? You hit your head.”

“No, I mean, it’s sore. But I don’t think it’s a concussion or anything.” Brooke traces her thumb in small circles against the base of Vanessa’s neck.

“What year is it?” Vanessa tests her.

“2009? I’m 22 and we’re in South Africa?”

Vanessa feigns offense. “Don’t joke, bitch. You coulda really got hurt.”

Vanessa traces her fingers in a slow, lazy figure eight at the edge of Brooke’s forehead. It’s like the cold tingle of menthol, but so much better than any balm. She lifts her hand into Vanessa’s touch (she’s starving) and it’s the only thing that makes any sense.

“You saved me.”

“Nah. Other way around.”

Vanessa’s hand stills over her temple, watching Brooke closely as she traces slowly down her her face to rest softly on the edge of her chin. And Brooke waits (watches, _wants_ ).

Vanessa kisses her softly. It’s more than a featherlight brush, but not enough for Brooke to totally fall in and lose herself. And yet she feels sparks shoot down her spine, tingle through her bones, and fill her bloodstream with stardust. Maybe she is concussed, maybe this isn’t happening. Either way she’s kissing Vanessa back, slow, careful, _grateful_.

There’s one thing that hasn’t spun out of control quite yet, and it’s this, holding on to Vanessa. So Brooke kisses her like she’s an anchor. Brooke roots herself in her arms and the covers and the baggy t-shirts like they’re her only tethers to solid ground. It’s also why she pulls back much sooner than she wants, just as she first feels Vanessa’s tongue just barely at the edge of her lip, oh _god--_ She pulls back and grounds herself down in reality. 

She’s breathless.

There’s no energy to talk, no words to use to address it. They can’t so they don’t. Vanessa settles her head against Brooke’s chest and that’s all Brooke needs to know. Vanessa is _there_ , warm and firm and alive.

So she does sleep, actually. The demons drown each other out. It’s white noise against the gentle circuit of Vanessa’s breath and the steady pace of her heart.

\--

Brooke’s alarm blares at eight a.m. She weasels her way out of the knot of covers and limbs to slip out of bed and silence her phone, and the anxiety starts swirling in her stomach before jumping into sharp relief. It’s not the most pleasant way to wake up.

Right. Okay. Dead body, Nina, her car, Vanessa, okay.

_Vanessa._

She’s draped almost diagonally across the bed, and she certainly has an impressive wingspan for someone so small. Her hair dried in a wild cloud around her face, and she’s got a single leg kicked over the bundle of blankets from which Brooke had emerged.

(Brooke wants to climb back in, nestle herself against Vanessa’s skin again, and forget everything outside the perimeter of the bed frame. How long could they wait until the rest of the world caught up? She remembers the crackle down her spine as Vanessa kissed her and she’s pretty sure she can survive on that exhilaration alone for a couple days, at least. It’s a dangerous theory to test.)

Brooke realizes then that she only has room in her body to panic intensely about one thing at a time. And Vanessa had smelled (and tasted?) like _coconut_ , but she chooses to panic about the body instead.

Nina says she’s 20 minutes away and Vanessa doesn’t seem like a woman who pops out of bed in the morning. Brooke steels herself. If she could, she’d let Vanessa sleep through this part, but she knows she can’t do this alone.

“Hey, we need to get up.” A hand, soft, on her shoulder. Vanessa stirs, scrunches up her face, and blinks open her eyes to peer at Brooke.

“Fuck,” she breathes, and says so much more with the concern behind the sleep in her eyes.

“Yeah.”

Vanessa pulls the covers back around her shoulders but doesn’t shut her eyes again. It’ll have to be good enough for now. 

In the bathroom, Brooke splashes cool water on her face. All things considered, she looks all right. There are dark circles under her eyes and her hair is an unsalvageable mess, but she’s had worse mornings. Years of early call times and ballet rehearsals after red-eye flights have prepared her to be ready to go at ridiculous hours and under ungodly circumstances. She can do this.

The bruise on her temple is gone. It’s weird. She touches the spot lightly, and it doesn’t even hurt. Brooke knows she bruises easily, but maybe she had a stroke of luck in the most inconsequential way. Fine, she’ll take it, one less thing to worry about. She ties her hair back in a serious bun, braced for a fresh and casual day of body disposal.

Brooke makes a pot of coffee and steps over the cooler, refusing to treat it as anything special. She brings Vanessa a steaming cup, has her sit up in bed and drink it. She gets dressed in another of Vanessa’s shirts and the rest of her clothes from yesterday. Brooke whirls through the apartment searching for anything that still has blood on it, collecting it, and throwing it in a trash bag to burn.

Vanessa emerges from the guest room, dressed but still sleepy and folded into herself. She pours herself a second cup of coffee and leans against the cupboard.

“I don’t want to do this,” she says as Brooke pauses to look at her.

Brooke sighs. “Me either. But it’s almost over.”

This isn’t the kind of thing that just ends, and they both know that. She already feels it creeping in the back of her consciousness, settling in the space between her shoulders, making itself at home. It’s not quite blame, not quite guilt, but instead a generic thick heaviness. It’s concrete that hasn’t quite set. 

She tucks a loose strand of hair behind Vanessa’s ear like it’s instinctual. Brooke’s hand lingers on her neck, and it’s an overwhelming kind of closeness, too similar to the ease and warmth of last night.

“Okay,” Vanessa breathes. It’s relief, or close enough.

(There’s another universe somewhere, an alternate timeline where Brooke gets to bring Vanessa coffee in bed without her boyfriend’s dead body in the kitchen. There’s a world where she can stay there, warm and safe, until Vanessa insists they eat something other than dry sugary cereal. There’s a world where she can kiss her deep, slow, focused. Not here, not now, but somewhere.)

The doorbell rings. Brooke steps away from Vanessa quickly like they’ve been caught, but the door is opaque and really, nothing was happening. Brooke sets her shoulders (up, back, down) and answers it.

Nina looks rough but Brooke is in no place to judge. “A _generational_ debt,” Nina reminds her.

“Hi, I’m Nina.” Nina reaches out a hand to Vanessa, which she shakes. And it has never been more apparent that Vanessa works in retail. She flashes Nina a boxy smile that’s believable enough, but Brooke knows what a real one looks like. “Is that coffee?”

Vanessa pours her a cup and it seems that things are going as well as they could be until Nina sits down on the cooler like it’s a bench. Brooke forces herself to keep smiling.

“I’ve had the worst morning,” Nina starts. “Dana lost her soccer uniform and I had to turn the entire house upside down looking for it. And then there was construction on the way over and-- What happened to your shoes?”

Brooke looks at the stack of shoes by the door and she feels all of her organs turn inside out. Her white canvas shoes are not so white anymore, and she missed them as she scoured the apartment.

“Oh, that’s just clay. From the garden.” And Brooke must be getting at least incrementally better at lying (trial by fire, she supposes) because it seems to go clear over Nina’s head.

“Right, I forgot about that!”

Brooke and Vanessa carry the cooler down the stairs. It’s nerve wracking. Brooke takes the heavier end, supporting it and keeping it from toppling down the wooden stairs and onto the neighbor’s fenced in backyard. If Vanessa is struggling Brooke can’t tell; her arms don’t shake. 

Nina drives a minivan because of course she does. The cooler fits easily behind the back row of seats. Vanessa sits up front with Nina to give directions to her work and Brooke takes the back, glancing over the seats at the cooler every now and then. She doesn’t trust it.

“So Vanessa, what do you do for work?” Nina, though exhausted, is ever the conversationalist.

“I work at a dress shop. Fittings and consults and all that stuff. Go left here.”

“Is it that one up on 19th? I think I’ve been there before. Nice place.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

“And remind me how you and Brooke met? I’m forgetting.” 

And _fuck_ , Nina is good. Too good. It’s not the time or place for Nina to be this cunning, but she does know her way around a secret.

Vanessa is oblivious. “Take a right. Uh, it was at that cemetery.”

Brooke covers her eyes. Nina is really twisting the knife, and Brooke realizes it’s going to be a while before she can actually feel comfortable with that metaphor.

“Oh, well that doesn’t sound familiar at all.” Nina’s tone is pointed, faux-pleasant, as she glares at Brooke through the rear view mirror.

“Nina--” Brooke starts.

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that, Brooke?”

“Nina, it’s weird, it’s a weird thing to say.”

“What did you tell her?” Vanessa asks, leaning around the seat to look at her, smiling at how Brooke is embarrassed. The morning light catches the red in her hair, and Brooke gets a glimpse of another universe. 

And of course it’s now, just as Brooke takes her eyes off the cooler, that Nina hits a pothole. Her car might look like a tank, but the suspension is garbage. The cooler bounces and tips over, opens up on its side as the car bobs and waves.

There’s a wet splat.

Vanessa freezes, immediately goes pale. Brooke is looking over the seats before she can think not to. There is truly an impressive quantity of blood that a human body can hold.

“Is everything okay?” Nina asks.

Everything is not okay. Blood is trickling out of the cooler, there’s a hole in the four layers of bags, and the leaking duct tape trash bag bundle has rolled out onto Nina’s pristinely clean floor mats.

“Is there ice everywhere? Was that a slosh?

“Yeah. But here, I can fix it--” Brooke reaches over the edge, but there’s too much blood to try and touch anything. She looks at Vanessa, who’s still frozen, horrified.

“No, here, it’ll be easier if we just pull over and fix it.” Nina clearly has no idea what’s going on, thinks she’s doing a favor. Brooke shudders. It’s all she can do.

So. It’s a bit like watching a plane go down. It’s gradual, weirdly distant, and crushingly inevitable. Nina pulls over on a residential street, puts her car in park, leaves the driver’s side door wide open. Brooke and Vanessa slip slowly from their seats in the hope that they can hold it off, slow down time. No luck.

Nina opens the back door. She sees what she sees. And this is the most nauseous Brooke has felt the entire time, probably, watching Nina try to make sense of the blood that’s started dripping out of the van.

“Nina,” Brooke starts. She’s got nowhere to go.

“What…” Nina goes to draw in a breath and finds that she can’t. It’s a horrible noise. Panic, fear, shock, it all sets in, and Nina can’t breathe.

“What’s happening?” Vanessa asks, hand over her mouth.

“Nina!” Brooke touches her, she flinches away, tries to brace herself against the back of the car. “Shit, oh my god, Nina--”

Nina is choking, coughing, wheezing, something is clearly very wrong. Brooke looks at her, at Vanessa, and feels completely and utterly helpless.

“Is it asthma? Does she have an inhaler? Something like that? C’mon Brooke…”

Brooke’s mind goes blank, her eyes lose focus. That’s it, then. This is karma, this is retribution. It doesn’t come in the form of a cop or a jury, but instead it’s watching her best friend suffocate covered in blood that isn’t her own. After what she’s done, what she’s been through, that feels about right.

“All right, _fuck_.” Vanessa’s voice cuts through her haze. “I said I wasn’t going to do this shit anymore.”

Vanessa snaps into focus. She’s all sharp edges, she’s shattered glass, she’s that same girl locked in her bedroom with a cut on her face and a willpower stronger than a cast iron skillet. She steps toward Nina, who is far too pale, and pulls Brooke with her.

“Hold her, okay?” Does Vanessa think she’s choking? Is this what a Heimlich is? She’s not sure, her world is spinning, but Vanessa (somehow, impossibly) seems to know what she’s doing. So she holds Nina, supports her from behind.

“I need you to trust me,” she says to Nina, and perhaps to Brooke a little as well. She puts a hand on Nina’s face, trying to get her lucid attention. “We don’t have a lot of other options right now.”

Vanessa closes her eyes, breathes deep. She puts one hand over Nina’s sternum, the other resting gently in the center of Nina’s forehead.

And then. Vanessa doesn’t do anything. She lifts an eyebrow, maybe, almost imperceptibly. But Brooke feels a jolt travel down Nina’s body before she goes limp in Brooke’s arms. Brooke stumbles to keep her upright.

“Put her in the back,” Vanessa says.

Brooke stares. “What?”

Vanessa sighs, frustrated, and then bends down to scoop Nina’s feet out from under her like it’s nothing. They guide her into the backseat and Brooke is running on autopilot because this clearly is not a world that she recognizes or understands. 

A pause. Vanessa checks her pulse. “Okay. She’s breathing. It’s fine, she’ll be fine. It was panic or asthma or something, but we need to go.”

“Vanessa, what did you do?”

The car is dinging, the keys still in the ignition, the driver’s side door still open. Vanessa slams the back door shut.

“We need to get out of here, there’s people around, there’s a fucking school right there--”

Vanessa’s not wrong, and thankfully there’s no real audience, but Brooke is still trying to make sense of the disparate elements and the series of events that just played out. And there’s fucking blood on her hands again.

“Vanessa, what the fuck was that?”

“Brooke--”

“Is she okay? What did you--”

“ _Brooke Lynn_.” Vanessa grabs her forearms tightly. Her smooth rock in a river full of rapids, her anchor in a sea of chaos. “I can’t explain right now. You gotta trust me, and you gotta drive.”

Brooke only has room in her body to panic about one thing at a time. 

“Okay. _Fuck_ , okay.”

She’s in the driver’s seat, seatbelt on, car in drive, parking brake, _Nina used the fucking parking brake_ , and then she floors it.


	5. sueño que estoy andando

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Brooke plants a garden and Vanessa tells a story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been coming together slowly, because it turns out it's a lot easier to ask interesting questions than it is to answer them. I've yet to be fully happy with it, but my beautiful beta Meggie told me it was her favorite one yet, which is more than good enough for me. Love ya gal <3

White-knuckled, Brooke holds the steering wheel tight and follows the rules of the road to the letter. She drives under the speed limit. The last thing, the  _last fucking thing_  she needs to happen after the past 24 hours is for a cop to pull them over.

Brooke drives to her house. Vanessa doesn’t tell her to, she just does. Vanessa is silent, her head in her hands, her knees pressed up to her chest. She’s as small as she possibly can be. Brooke hits another pothole (and christ, these roads aren’t helping anyone) and Nina jostles in the back seat, slouches over, her face pressed against the window. 

They finally pull into her driveway, and Brooke has to get out to manually open the gate. Her legs wobble, and she tries to stay upright and not think about it at the same time. It’s that same post-rush shaky feeling that comes after riding a rollercoaster or bouncing on the trampoline. Her feet don’t trust the ground.

Then they’re stopped in the carport, Brooke kills the engine, and they might as well be underwater. She can hear Vanessa breathing, but that’s the only proof there’s any air. It’s a numb silence. Her eyes fall out of focus, and the green of the grass and the speckled soil piled around the unfinished garden bed meld together.

(She wants to curl up in that pit, the blood on her shoes and her skin mixing with the red clay of the earth. She wants to pull the fresh gardening soil on top of her like a warm blanket to protect against the underground chill. She wants to sink into the earth, disappear, run away from a problem that’s become far too much to bear.)

Wait. 

“Vanessa.”

Brooke watches Vanessa’s shoulders expand as she draws in a deep breath, letting out a heavy sigh. She turns her head just barely to look at Brooke, and she seems just as shell shocked and numb as Brooke still feels. But now there’s a light that snapped on, an unchecked box, one they can’t just wait for or give up on.

“We should bury it. Him.”

Vanessa blinks. “Here?” 

“Here. Come on.” Brooke unbuckles her seatbelt and prays Vanessa will follow her, because she’s not about to drag a heavy corpse through her backyard alone.

The back of the car is a mess. Unsalvageable. Another problem to add to the list, but she pushes it down in priority.

“Fuck.” Vanessa is there, bracing herself on the edge of the car for support.

They don’t bother with the cooler; there’s not enough space in Nina’s car to maneuver it the way they need anyway. The body is stiff, cold, and grotesquely bent (“in cold blood” is a phrase she’s trying not to think about right now) but they manage to lift it, and Brooke steers them over to the garden. 

It isn’t six feet. It’s maybe four, if they’re generous. But there’s no way either of them has the strength in their body to dig into the cold earth, and she’s not sure if six feet is necessary or just convention. So this is going to have to be it.

They drop it in, a heavy thunk.

“Are you sure?” Vanessa asks. It’s oddly casual, the way she wipes the blood off on her jeans.

Brooke knows there are better ways to do this, but none so open and ready as an already-dug pit in her backyard. The promise she had felt looking down at it, was that meant for this? “Yeah. This is it.”

Vanessa sinks down, brings her arms around her knees. She’s got her eyes locked on the body, an unreadable expression that could be anything between unqualified disdain and hidden regret. And Brooke is so fucking confused, but she just wants to throw her arms around Vanessa, pick her up, run away. 

“Hey, it’s okay.” Brooke kneels next to her, drops a hand on her shoulder. It’s tentative, the first time she’s touched Vanessa since whatever she did to Nina (with Nina? on Nina?), but it hurts more to stand back and let her ache alone.

Vanessa heaves a shuddering breath. “I’m so fucking tired.”

“I know, me too, but it’s almost over.” It’s a lie, Brooke’s lying. She said that about an hour ago and things have gotten exponentially more complicated since then. There’s no end in sight, but that’s not a helpful thought.

“Not like that. Doing that, for Nina, it takes a lot out of me.” Vanessa breathes deep and Brooke can see it, a different level of exhaustion, the color drained out of her face.

“You should lay down, I can handle this for now.” Potentially also a lie, maybe more of a hypothesis. Brooke will test it, at least.

“Nah, it’s fine, I’ll be fine--” Vanessa tries to get up and wobbles. Brooke catches her by the arm. 

“Come on, come lay down.”

Brooke doesn’t know how this works. She’s not quite sure  _what_  Vanessa is, and if witches or telekinetics or whatever have different health needs. But she leads her inside all the same.

Vanessa falls back in the same spot on her couch, and Brooke pulls out the same blanket. Same spot, same woman, absolutely incomprehensibly different circumstances.

“Can I, um, get you anything?”

“Juice would be nice. Grape, if you have it.”

“I’ve got cranberry?”

“Perfect.”

Juice. She pours Vanessa a glass. And one for herself, because hell, it can’t hurt.

“You’re okay?” Brooke brings one to Vanessa, and she props herself up against the cushions to drink it.

“Yeah, this is… this happens. It’ll be fine.” Vanessa reaches out and takes Brooke’s hand, squeezing it loosely. “You’re not mad at me?”

“No.” Brooke squeezes back. And she means it. She’s confused, drifting in what feels like a dream world, but she isn’t mad.

Vanessa smiles, sets her half-full glass down next to the couch. “Thank you,” she says softly.

Her eyes look heavy, and her hand relaxes in Brooke’s. “Rest,” Brooke whispers. And without thinking it through, she presses a kiss to Vanessa’s forehead.

Vanessa’s eyes drift shut, the picture of serenity, and Brooke can’t regret it.

And then it’s time to get to work.

She remembers Nina is still in the back of her car. That doesn’t look good, doesn’t make Brooke feel like a very good friend, but in the context of everything that’s gone down so far today, Brooke definitely doesn’t deserve to feel like a good friend. She grabs a pillow out of her room and places it under Nina’s head as she lays across the back seat. She’s not sure how long she’ll be out, but she should at least be comfortable. It’s both the least and the most Brooke can do.

There’s a shovel already stuck in the soil piled next to the garden pit. She eyes it tentatively. The lump at the bottom of the pit seems to taunt her. She can see the curve of how it’s folded, and she can make out generally where the arms and the head and the legs would be. It’s too human of a form. And yet she remembers the look in his eyes, the cardamom in Vanessa’s kitchen, and the cut across Vanessa’s face (which is gone now too? How did she not  _notice--_ ). That shouldn’t make it easier. This shouldn’t be easy. But she picks up the shovel, spears it into the soil, and heaps it on top of Victor’s dead body.

“Asshole,” she murmurs to no one but herself. She’s pretty sure Vanessa would agree.

Brooke briefly considers the environmental impact of burying so many trash bags, and eventually figures it’s probably miniscule in the grand scheme of things. She shovels heap after heap of soil until the earth is even again, a beautiful empty garden bed ready for planting. It’s almost November, sure, but she thinks she can find something that will grow.

As Brooke wipes a little sweat from her forehead, she realizes that maybe she should start thinking like a rich person. Rich people don’t bury their own bodies, and they don’t scrub blood out of the upholstery of their friends’ cars. They pay someone else to do that. But Brooke wouldn’t know where to start on that front.

She rubs the sore tendons in her hands and leans back against her countertop. It isn’t even 11 a.m., and Brooke’s already done far more than she usually does in a day. It’s an icy sense of accomplishment, but she’ll take it. It’s better than just feeling vacant. 

So. Brooke does the only other thing she knows to keep herself busy. She cooks. She didn’t eat breakfast, which is a good thing since she probably wouldn’t have kept it down, but it makes sense now. A post-burial brunch.

She whisks together some eggs, melts butter in her cast iron skillet, and smiles as they sizzle when she combines them. She pulls out some odds and ends from her fridge, some crumbled goat cheese and some mushrooms left over from a bolognese she made a few nights ago, and sprinkles them on top.

“Smells good.”

She turns to see Vanessa leaning in the archway, her hair somehow even more disheveled than before.

“Want one?” Brooke asks, folding the omelette perfectly in half.

“Sure.” Vanessa perches on a bar stool, and Brooke transfers the omelette onto a plate and slides it across the countertop to Vanessa.

Brooke starts on a second one for herself. “Are you feeling better?”

“I am, yeah. Sorry I couldn’t help with…” She gestures loosely toward the backyard. “All of that.”

“It’s okay.”

Brooke doesn’t know how to ask. She doesn’t really know  _what_  to ask, because “ _what did you do to Nina?_ ” sound accusatory, and “ _what are you?_ ” makes it sound like Vanessa is a rare escaped zoo animal. So she just cooks, exacting in her mushroom distribution, precise in her omelette fold.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Vanessa finally says.

“So you can read minds too?”

Vanessa stifles a laugh. “No, bitch. But yeah, that.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.” Brooke plates her own omelette, and leans up against the counter across from Vanessa.

She chews for a minute, looks at the ground. “You’re too good to me.”

“It would help to know, though, if Nina is just going to be like that forever.”

“God, no, she’ll be up in a couple hours, probably. And we’ll need to figure out something to tell her. But she’ll be fine.” Vanessa takes another bite of her omelette. “But no, I can tell you. I kind of owe you that, now that there’s a body in your backyard.”

Of all things, Brooke laughs.

Vanessa smiles, rubs the side of her face. “Shit, I don’t even know where to start. It’s messy. 

“Start wherever. We’ve got time.”

She shuts her eyes, takes a deep breath, and tells Brooke a story.

\--

“Once upon a time, in a castle carved into the side of the mountain, there lived a young princess named Vanessa--”

“No more fake stories about me!” Vanessa is six, and she knows better. “Tell me a real one. About a real person.”

“If you want real stories, I can read you the newspaper.” Her abuela turns back to the pot she’s stirring over the stove. 

“No, no! Okay, you can tell me a fake story. But don’t pretend it’s about me.” Vanessa has propped herself up against the refrigerator, listening intently from the floor.

“There’s no such thing as a fake story, Vanessa. Every story’s got a little bit of truth to it. But all right, I’ll tell you something different.”

Vanessa closes her eyes, eager to watch the scene play out in her mind.

“Once upon a time, there was a young girl named… Ines. And she wasn’t a princess, she was a regular girl with a very regular life. And she lived in a house with her mama and her abuela, just like you, but they lived very far out in the country where there weren’t many people around. But Ines made friends with the chickens and goats they kept in their yard, so she was never lonely. Their house was very close to a small but powerful river, and at night they could hear frogs chirping and water crashing against the large rocks.

“One day, Ines went outside to play. She walked along the bank of the river, and the water was so clear and fresh that she could see all the fish that lived there. She reached down and cupped the water in her hands. When she drank a small sip, she could taste the sparkles from the sunlight. 

“Ines walked further from her home and further down the river until she found a tree that had fallen across the river. She decided to walk across it. But the tree wasn’t very sturdy, and when she was halfway across it broke into pieces. And Ines was swept down the river. 

“Ines wasn’t a very good swimmer--”

“Is she going to die?” Vanessa interjects worriedly.

“Let me tell it, querida. Ines wasn’t a very good swimmer, but she was very lucky, because there was a boy catching fish nearby, just down the stream. He saw her struggling to free herself from the current, so he dove in and lifted her out. He was very happy when he saw that she was safe and unharmed, even though she was very shaken up by the fall. Ines said she was very grateful, and thanked him many times.

“But, the boy told her something she hadn’t known before. ‘When someone saves your life,’ he said, ‘then you owe them tremendously.’ He asked her to help him catch more fish, and she was happy to do so. But when he was done for the day, he said, ‘You will come back here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and help me catch fish. Because I saved your life.’ Ines was grateful for that, so she agreed.”

“What was the boy’s name?” 

“...Gregory.”

“That’s a terrible name.”

“I know. And he was a terrible boy. Gregory didn’t just make Ines help him catch fish. He made her do his laundry in the stream and cook the fish for him to eat. It made her very tired, and she wasn’t able to spend as much time with her mama and abuela and chickens and goats anymore. But she showed up every day because he saved her life, and she knew her life was very important.

“Then one day, Ines decided that she was tired of helping Gregory. She told him that she would not be helping him fish, or clean, or cook anymore. Gregory was upset, confused, and very frustrated. He called her awful names, but Ines crossed her arms and stood strong. His words bounced off of her. And after he was done, she turned around and started walking back down the river towards her house.

“She could hear his footsteps following behind her. Ines started running, and Gregory started running too. They finally reached her house, and Ines worried that he might follow her inside. But he never got the chance. Her mama and abuela came out of the house banging pots and pans together to scare him off. The chickens pecked at his ankles. The goats butted him with their horns. Gregory stumbled backwards, tripped over a rock, and fell hard on the ground at the river’s edge.

“‘I am so grateful to have friends and family like you,’ Ines said to her mama and abuela and chickens and goats. ‘He was wrong, no one can save your life if they don’t help you live it.’ She walked over toward Gregory. ‘And now, I will save his.’

“Ines pulled Gregory back from the river. She told him something he hadn’t known before. ‘I have always had the power to help you, but you have to trust me, not demand anything of me.’ She saw he was in pain, and she wanted there to be less of that in the world. And with that power to help, she soothed his skin where the chickens had pecked and healed the bruises shaped like goat horns in his side.

As soon as he was healed, Gregory ran away. Ines was happy. He never tried to return to her family’s home again. And they lived very happily in their home, all safe and together, for the rest of time." 

Vanessa waits a moment, mulling it over. “Why did it end like that?”

“It’s a story, that’s how it ends.”

“Was she like a bruja all along? Couldn’t she have put a curse on him or something?”

“The story means that it’s always better to be gentle, mi corazón. You can win, even when you’re gentle.”

“She should have gotten back at him. That’s a better ending.” Again: Vanessa is six, and she knows better. 

Vanessa’s abuela sighs, and then smiles softly. “Soup’s done. Are you ready for lunch?”

Vanessa doesn’t do well with cautionary tales. She takes away the wrong information, gets caught up in a minor detail, swept up in the ever-expanding storybook image in her mind. So that’s why when her abuela lays down for a quick nap after they eat, Vanessa escapes for an adventure.

She has to plod through the mud and navigate tangles of thistles before the river. It’s not so much a river as it is some kind of drainage overflow, but Vanessa will take what she can get. It’s at the bottom of a steep incline down from the road, and she steps down toward it in cautious increments. The water isn’t clear enough to see fish through, but maybe there’s some boy she can stand up to on the other side.

Then, she loses her footing. She’s sliding down the hill, grasping for anything that she can hang on to, and her hand grips tight around something sharp. It’s a shattered beer bottle. The glass cuts deep into her hand, and she gasps in pain as it comes back bright red.

She climbs out of the ditch and runs home with tears in her eyes and blood on her skirt. Her abuela is up, looking for her, and her eyes quickly widen with concern when she sees Vanessa waving her injured hand.

“Oh, Vanessa,” she sighs, gently petting her hair. “Let’s fix you up.”

In retrospect, the cut must have been pretty deep to warrant this from her abuela. But she holds Vanessa’s hand under lukewarm water for a few minutes, rinsing out the rocks and dirt, before cupping it gently in her own hands. Slowly, she runs her fingers over the deep gash, closing up the opened skin, smoothing over the indent where it joined. With her good hand, Vanessa wipes her tears.

Her abuela traces and traces until the wound is gone, the skin is closed and sealed, the redness and swelling and pain drawn up and out and away. She smiles down at her handiwork, giving Vanessa’s palm a small squeeze.

“There. You’re all better.”

Vanessa looks down at her hand, and flexes her fingers. It feels good as new. No blood, no scar, no pain. She sniffles, marveling at it, and smiles. “Thanks, abuela.”

So. That’s the first time.

At least, it’s the first time she remembers. There were probably others before that, and many others after (the “special bandages” only her abuela had were particularly suspicious). But she doesn’t think too much about it until ten years later when she comes home early from a friend’s house and sees her mom holding an ice pack and sitting on the kitchen table. Her mom’s got a black eye, and her abuela is tracing slow circles around it.

“Mama, what happened?” Vanessa asks, her book bag slipping off her shoulder.

“It’s nothing, baby, why don’t you go to your room--”

“No. I wanna know what’s going on.” Vanessa crosses her arms and pops her hip, a move which hasn’t failed her yet.

The two women look at each other before her abuela sighs. “Come here, querida. Let me show you something.”

Her abuela takes her hand gently and guides it to touch the skin where the bruise is blossoming around her mother’s eye. She feels tingles, like her hand is falling asleep, but maybe she’s just nervous.

“Don’t press, but… do you feel that?” 

Vanessa’s fingertips hover over her mom’s eye. It’s weird as hell, because her eyes are closed, but Vanessa’s never felt more watched. She feels without pressing, feels that it’s warm and smooth and basically that’s just what skin feels like, but then she follows the tingles deeper into something outside the contact of her fingers, and feels a sharp, white-hot pulse of electricity rocket up her arm.

“The fuck--?” Vanessa pulls her fingers back like she’s been burned, maybe she  _has_ , and both women eye her sternly. “Language, sorry, okay. But what was that?”

“It’s nothing, baby, you don’t have to--” her mom says quickly. 

“Paula. She should know. It’s better to know.”

The kitchen’s too quiet. Her mom sighs, relents, as Vanessa looks worriedly between the two of them.

“Vanessa, mi vida,” her abuela begins. “Ever since I was a little girl, there were things I could do that other people couldn’t. The same is true for your mother, and now I think the same is true for you too. You can help people. It’s something that you will have to learn, but I can show you. But only if you want.”

It’s not the way girls dream of finding out that they’re some supernatural kind of special. Vanessa has possibly been electrocuted and she still has fucking math homework to do tonight. But her abuela’s eyes are strong and Vanessa would trust her to the end of the earth, so she squares her shoulders and nods.

“I want to.” Her voice is small, but sure.

Her mom flinches as she gets close, even though her eyes are closed, some evolutionary defense mechanism.

“Paula, you have to trust her.” Her abuela’s voice is knowing.

Her mom shakes her shoulders, tries to relax. “Okay.”

Vanessa puts her fingers back, so lightly and just below her mom’s eyebrow. As her fingers trace along the edge of the bruise, she finds the tingles again and draws them towards her slowly. They gather up her arm like she’s pulling on an old wool sweater. It shimmers on her skin, sediments, and settles into her bones. And as she collects it, the dark purple around her mom’s eye shrinks, dissipates, until her skin is clear again. 

It’s like wiping away horror movie makeup. Her mom’s got a tear in her eye.

“Hey, don’t cry,” Vanessa says, wrapping her arms around her mom’s shoulders in a tight hug.

“Thank you, mija,” her mom whispers against her ear.

“Do you feel all right?” her abuela asks.

Vanessa stretches her arm, rolls her wrist around, and feels the sparks settling in her joints. “Weird, but fine.”

“I’ll show you more some other day, okay? Only if you want.” Her abuela touches the back of her neck gently, more sparks, soothing. “But now, it’s a school night.”

Vanessa nods, too confused to do anything other than trust and agree.

“Mama, what happened?” she asks one more time before she goes up to her room.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” her mom says with a tight-lipped smile.

(Her mother never tells her, but Vanessa figures it out.)

Her abuela stays true on her promise. She shows Vanessa everything she can: how to heal bruises and fractures (and acne scars, thank  _god_ ), how to manipulate a body, how to reset someone’s entire system, knock them out. It’s wickedly exciting. She watches in wonder as she moves her abuela’s hand through the air, wiggles her fingers in a smooth wave, all without touching her. She’s tried piano lessons and the soccer team, but this is the first thing that she’s actually fucking  _good_  at. And it’s exhilarating.

Energy is a weird thing, and she doesn’t fully understand it. She knows there’s bits of information about this whole thing that her abuela is keeping from her, explanations that feel incomplete. When she pulls away scrapes and bruises or moves a hand by an inch, something transfers over to her, crystalizes in her bones, makes them creak. It fades quickly, but the bigger stuff doesn’t. The first time she knocks someone out she doesn’t feel right for a week. She doesn’t tell her abuela because she just figures she’s doing something minor wrong, something she can adjust and fix without her noticing. It never happens, but Vanessa manages.

Showing off doesn’t go so well. Vanessa takes a bruise off her best friend’s leg, but then she starts looking at Vanessa differently, starts sitting somewhere else during lunch. She reins it in a bit after that, doing as much as she can in secret. That poses its own problems, especially since subtlety isn’t Vanessa’s strong suit. She knocks a girl out at school, some bitch who keeps shoulder checking her in the hall, but the security footage makes it look like Vanessa pushed her. There’s no way to explain, so she gets suspended.

She keeps it on the down low for a while. But then she’s 22 and fighting with her boyfriend. It’s just like any other night, trying to out-scream each other across the living room of his apartment, but then he’s too close to her, his hand raised. She panics. She freezes his hand in the air, but it’s unstable and doesn’t hold. He probably hits her harder than he was already going to.

And that’s it. She swears off of it. She goes over to her abuela’s apartment less and less, says she’s taking on too many shifts at work. It’s sad, but it’s necessary. It’s not her abuela’s fault, but if she knew, Vanessa knows she would understand. Vanessa gets rusty, but she learns to live with bruises (the ones from running into cabinets, though, never from boyfriends.) Most days she doesn’t think about it. She can pretend she dreamed it. A too-real fairytale in its own right.

But then Vanessa is 26 and her abuela gets sick. It’s one of those long, slow illnesses that everyone knows kills you one way or another, but nobody wants to talk about that. So she goes over to her mom’s place, where her abuela is bedridden but stable because… well,  _because_. Because she needs to. Because she should.

“Abuelita,” Vanessa says softly at the door to her room.

Her abuela smiles up at her, holds out a hand, and Vanessa takes it.

Her abuela knows that she’s dying. Vanessa’s mother told her so over the phone, and honestly, it’s something she barely knows how to think about. It must be so terrifying, it must be so lonely, and yet her abuela looks absolutely serene. Small, sure, but peaceful.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been better.” Her abuela smiles, knows it’s an understatement.

“Where does it hurt?”

“Eh.” She shrugs. It’s a non-answer, and Vanessa can only imagine the reality.

But Vanessa owes her abuela the whole world, owes her so much of the joy she’s felt in her life, so she doesn’t question the impulse. She puts her hand gently on her abuela’s shoulder, reaches further without pushing, and feels a dull orange energy flickering at her fingertips. 

She’s not sure what she’s holding. It feels different than the kind of pain she’s used to handling, or maybe it’s just been so long that she’s forgotten how it’s supposed to feel. But as she pulls it away, her abuela’s eyes drift shut. It’s like fog burning off a hilltop, something coming into focus.

Vanessa feels it run up her arm and settle, but it doesn’t make her bones creak like bruises and cuts and scars. It keeps flickering, a little flame that settles into her elbows, her shoulders, the base of her spine.

Vanessa kisses the top of her abuela’s head, whispers a soft  _te amo_  in her ear, and watches her chest rise and fall steadily for a few moments. Then she goes to sit in the kitchen with her mother, slice up a mango, and try not to cry.

The next morning she wakes up to a text from her mother.  _Abuela passed in the night_. Her shoulders fall, ice shoots through her chest. Was this her fault? Did she make this happen, somehow, when she was trying to help her? No, her abuela had seemed nothing but comfortable, nothing but safe. And that little bit of orange energy flickered in her joints just to remind her it’s there.

Maybe it’s a gift. She holds on to it, keeps a close eye on it, notes how it sways and dances every day, even as her abuela is lowered into the earth. Part of her wants to bury this ability, this thing she still doesn’t have a name for, along with her. It’s a lot to hold. But it seems like this haunting bit of energy doesn’t want to fade.

That could have been it. As far as she’s telling Brooke in her kitchen, that’s it. She edits out this last part, holds it for herself.

It’s not just the residual energy that makes Vanessa pick up her magic again. It’s Brooke.

(Brooke, who  _gets_  it, who speaks the same language, unaccented. Brooke, whose spine she watches straighten more every week, a flower peeking up through a gap in the sidewalk.  Brooke, who is an impossible hybrid of soft spots and sharp edges. Brooke, who trusts her, which she can’t understand.)

She touches Brooke’s leg in the graveyard and probes a little deeper than she should (maybe because Brooke’s mysterious and confusing, or maybe because her eyes are the greenest Vanessa’s ever seen, jury’s out). Something lights up, and Vanessa feels it in her spine.

It’s more than a spark. It’s a crack of thunder somewhere in the distance, a ripple effect, a muffled signal that a storm is coming. And she leans into it, because fuck it.

And then she can’t stop. Not even with a body in her kitchen. This thing, this magic, gets her into impossible situations, but it’s clearly not something she can run from.

Vanessa doesn’t do well with cautionary tales. She makes a lot of fucking mistakes, and only learns from some of them. She’d follow her heart off a cliff.

She does, maybe, when she wipes the bruise away from Brooke’s temple and kisses her in her guest room. It feels like holding her palm up against a flame, just far enough away to not get burned.

It’s gentle. Through all the fucking violence and blood Brooke is gentle. Soft spots, sharp edges. A knife through the slots in a ribcage.

Vanessa is still learning from her abuela’s stories, but every time she feels a flicker in her bones she thinks that maybe, somewhere, her abuela is a little bit proud.


	6. me proteja y me salve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nina relives her glory days and Scarlet can’t quite solve a mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys!! It's been a while! I hope this new update is worth the wait! Thank yall for still following this fic, for your patience, and for your unending enthusiasm <3

 

Brooke’s not sure when she grabbed Vanessa’s hand. Maybe it was to still her fingers drumming against the table as she spoke, so cautious and slow. Whenever it was, now Brooke’s slowly tracing the tendons with her thumb, trying to fill a silence that’s already too heavy with apprehension. 

“So. That’s me.” Vanessa’s cards are on the table. She bites her lip. 

“So it’s…” Brooke doesn’t have the words yet. She hesitates, hoping Vanessa might jump in with an answer. She doesn’t, and maybe she’s just as hungry for a concise word as Brooke is. “It’s magic?” Brooke manages finally. 

“I guess. I don’t really know if there’s rules or names or shit like that. There’s things I can do that other people can’t, and I don’t know much other than that. I’m winging it, mostly.”

Brooke is processing, and she knows her face shows it.

“You’re freaked out,” Vanessa says.

“No, I’m not—”

“Bitch, I knocked your best friend unconscious, you can be freaked out.”

“Okay, fine, I’m a little… I’m getting used to it.” Freaked out means skittish. Freaked out means running away. Brooke is neither. It’s nothing weirder than anything else that’s happened in the past 24 hours, and this answer almost feels like a comfort, a touchpoint, however foreign it is.

Vanessa rolls her eyes, clicks her tongue. “I don’t tell most people. Or anyone, really.” The corner of Vanessa’s mouth turns up just a little, almost imperceptibly. “But we’re really in this together now, there’s a damn body in your garden, so you better catch up quick.”

Brooke can’t help but smile.

“What does it feel like?” Brooke asks.

“It feels like…” Vanessa’s hand has been still in Brooke’s ever since she grabbed it, but now she squeezes back, and runs a finger slowly up and down the inside of Brooke’s palm as she thinks. “I don’t know, it’s like I’m holding something that isn’t actually there, but it  _is_. And it’s not like a solid thing, so I gotta be careful? If that makes sense?”

“Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.” Vanessa lifts her free hand and brushes a blonde curl from where it’s fallen over Brooke’s eye. She touches lightly on the spot where Brooke’s bruise should be, and something throws itself together in Brooke’s chest. Something pops into place, a joint in a socket, the last puzzle piece. 

“Not the little stuff,” Vanessa continues, and her touch tingles like menthol. “Not like this. The bigger stuff, the scary shit, like with Nina… that doesn’t feel so good.” 

Vanessa looks at her long and warm and she’s so overwhelmingly  _there_. But before Brooke can step over her last rational thought and topple right over into her, there’s a voice from the hallway. 

“I’ll say.”

It’s Nina. She’s got her shoulders squared, wearing the same stern, solid expression she typically reserved for terse interactions with Jason or talking back to her daughter’s soccer coach after a rough game. And Brooke could almost be scared of her if she wasn’t clutching the pillow Brooke had placed under her head to her chest like it’s a life raft.

“I hate to interrupt. But would one of you kindly explain why I just woke up in the back seat of my own car?”

“Nina.” Brooke stands cautiously. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

Nina doesn’t get angry. It’s a rare sight, one Brooke hardly knows how to handle. She’s a quiet kind of furious, all distant and shut down and unreadable. As long as Brooke has known her, she’s only seen Nina this upset when her husband forgot to pick up Millie from tennis the one day he was responsible for her. Nina fumed for a week before she finally came around.

(From Nina, Brooke will accept forgiveness on any timeline.)

Brooke makes Nina an omelette and tells her everything. She’s not creative enough to edit what they did into something prettier, but moreover Brooke knows Nina deserves better than that. She gets the whole truth: the figs, the scotch, the knife, the trash bags, all of it. The only thing she edits out is that kiss in the guest room, mostly for her own sake, though she’s pretty sure Nina already knows. Nina always just knows. 

Brooke is surprised as Nina’s face melts into sympathy. Nina nods along, covers her mouth, drums her fingers across her lower lip as she listens.

She doesn’t deserve Nina, has never deserved Nina, but the woman is walking proof that sometimes the universe is kind.

Vanessa decides that they’ll all be better off with a little more juice, so she mixes up some mimosas. And weirdly, it helps Brooke root herself in reality because it’s so casual, just any other brunch she would have with either Nina or Vanessa in her kitchen. Because everything that happened is normal now. It has to be.

“So, we didn’t really mean to involve you, but things just kept getting messier and then… Well, you were freaking out and we had to stop that.” Brooke tries to gloss it, because she knows it’s Vanessa’s story to tell, and she probably couldn’t explain it if she tried. Fortunately, she jumps in.

“I’m kind of a witch, it’s complicated, but I think you might have suffocated or stroked out if I hadn’t knocked you out.” Vanessa chews on her lip. “Sorry about that, by the way.”

Nina shakes her head, somehow immediately understanding. “No, no. It’s all still blurry but… I think you saved me. Thank you.”  

Vanessa meets Nina’s deeply sincere eyes with a small, reserved smile. Brooke can tell Nina makes Vanessa nervous, and she’s not quite sure why, but it seems like Vanessa has started treating the moment of stability they’ve wandered into as if it’s fragile like glass.

Brooke wishes she could be as careful as Vanessa. She wishes she knew how to hold back details that might put Nina in more danger than she’s already in, because knowing too much could be just as disastrous as having actual blood on her hands. But the story spills out of Brooke and Nina doesn’t stop her, for better or worse.

“So you’ve been out for two hours. And now we’re here.”

Nina is thinking so loudly that Brooke can almost hear it. Vanessa’s got her arms wrapped around her own body like she knows there are consequences for being too vulnerable (and she’s been so vulnerable, Brooke knows, has been there) and Brooke fights the urge to walk over there and replace them with her own.

“All right,” Nina says finally. 

“All right?”

“That all makes sense.”

Vanessa chuckles, a clipped and doubtful sound. “No, it doesn’t.”

“I mean, it’s horrifying, sure, but…” Nina twirls the stem of her mimosa glass in between her fingers and looks directly at Vanessa. “I understand. If I had been in your situation, I could have done the same thing.” 

Vanessa looks uneasy and certainly speechless. Nina continues.

“Horrifying things happen every day. Sometimes it’s senseless, but really that’s rare. I think the closer you look, the more people have reasons for the things they do. What you did, both of you, wasn’t senseless. So I understand.”

It has never been more evident to Brooke that Nina knows her better than Brooke knows herself. Nina can sort through the pieces of her world like they’re a sensible map and not a collection of discontinuous fragments that feel sharp in her chest. Maybe it’s a talent, maybe it’s kindness, maybe it’s love.

Nina takes Vanessa’s hand, probably just because it’s close, and holds it. Vanessa gives her a tight-lipped smile, one that Nina is probably perceptive enough to recognize is composed of a cocktail of fear and gratitude and deep-seated doubt.

Brooke sits in it, lets it settle, lets two disparate parts of the hurricane of her life solidify and become achingly real.

After a minute Vanessa escapes to the bathroom, wringing her hair through her hands, and Nina turns to look at Brooke with an expression that’s too familiar:  _I know you’re pretty broken and I wish I had an assembly manual_ , only she never needs to really say it. There’s something different, though, maybe just a little bit of hope. 

“I’m going to buy you a new car,” Brooke says. “A Mercedes, a Ferrari, whatever you want.”

“You can’t buy my loyalty, Brooke. This is all authentic.” Nina stacks her plate on Vanessa’s, piles their silverware on top. “But yes, a Mercedes might be nice.”

Brooke comes up behind the bar stool that Nina is seated on, wraps her arms around Nina’s shoulders, and buries her forehead against her neck. Nina has held her countless times when she needed to get away from Jason, when she needed some kind of respite or reminder that maybe this wasn’t the way that things were supposed to be. This time, as she squeezes tight around Nina’s shoulders, it’s for both of them. She’s clinging to Nina like a life raft and working to keep her intact all the same. 

“Is she going to be all right?” Nina asks, and then quickly shakes her head. “That’s a ridiculous question, considering the circumstances, but you know what I mean.”

“She’s pretty strong,” Brooke says, something unidentifiable twisting in her throat.

“I like her.” Nina touches Brooke’s forearm lightly. 

“You do?”

“She’s a real person. And maybe I only have evidence contrary to this, but I think she might be good for you.”

Brooke laughs and smiles into Nina’s shirt. Because yeah, maybe.

When Vanessa marches back in, she’s got her hair tied up in a ponytail (with one of Brooke’s scrunchies, but she’ll process that later) and a face so serious that Brooke almost doesn’t realize the redness around her eyes.

“I’ve got a plan. And it’s not a great plan, but I’ve got a plan, and I think it’s about time we leap back into action.”

 

\--

 

Vanessa takes a Tide stick to Nina’s dress before Brooke calls her a car.

It’s been about three years since Nina’s been in a stage production. Most recently, she played Miss Hannigan in that community theater production of  _Annie_ , and she brought in freshly baked cookies for the kids playing the orphans every night just to remind them it was all an act. She promised a lot of them she’d come back for a different show in the next season, but it never materialized. The symphony fundraising picked up dramatically, and Millie started taking tennis lessons over an hour away, so Nina took a more-than-brief hiatus from the stage. She hated it. Hates it, still. 

All this to say, Nina’s ready to put on a show.

She smears her makeup, breaks one of her heels against the sidewalk, and marches into the police station. 

(She digs up real tears for it. She cries for Brooke, who seems to have broken, but is reassembling the pieces of herself into something fragmented but new and promising. She cries for Vanessa, who she barely knows but seems to carry more trauma and passion than is humanly possible in her small body. She cries for herself, taps into the confusion and disorientation of this whole day that she tried to push down in front of Brooke so she could hear her out. She cries because loving your friends is complicated and doesn’t make sense, but she’d never consider for a second doing anything else. Maybe it’s steering a bit away from the character she’s trying to play. But that character is crying because her family could have been in danger, and honestly, it’s the same thing.)

Not only is Nina an actress, but she is also incredibly perceptive. She knows how to read the energy of an audience and give them what they want. These cops are too easy. They’re buying every second of it, taking detailed notes, handing her tissue after tissue which she graciously uses. 

A carjacking. A young, white man, dark curly hair, shorter than her. A Best Buy employee name tag that said “Victor.” Vanessa even showed her pictures of him on her phone so Nina would really know what she was talking about. 

The officers take notes. They nod sympathetically. She hands them her business card in case they have any further questions, and makes sure it’s the one with her husband’s company on it, the one with gold lettering that smells like juniper. They give her a ride back home, and as she catches her reflection in the rear view mirror, she tries not to look too self-satisfied.

In the end, Brooke doesn’t really need to buy her a new car. It’s covered by her husband’s auto plan. But perhaps she pockets the insurance money without him knowing, perhaps she lets Brooke buy her a car and feel like she’s paying her back in increments, and perhaps she books a solo spa retreat for a weekend in March.

And if it means that for a couple of days she gets to pick up the kids from school in Jon’s Porsche convertible that hasn’t been driven in years, so be it. Nina’s not complaining.

 

\--

 

Once Nina is gone, Brooke walks out into the street in front of her house to double check that no one can see the car from the street. She’s fortunate. The shrubs are high enough that even when the gate opens, Nina’s car is completely hidden.

It’s not the best strategy, but it’ll have to do for now. If she had been able to think more clearly, maybe Brooke would have had the mind to put the body in the driver’s seat, throw the car in neutral, and push it off a cliff outside of town. That would have been dramatic, and exciting, and probably would have made her feel more like a real murderer.

This way is probably better, though. This way is quiet.

Jason’s sister got his hideous yellow Tesla in the will (and thank god) which means they could even roll it up into the garage, cover it with a tarp, and forget about it, and still have plenty of space for Brooke’s car--

Her car, which is still parked next to Vanessa’s apartment. Okay.

Just as it felt like the day was about to stop spinning, there’s another loose end. She wonders if this will ever stop, or if it’s just going to be all about playing catch up with this chaos from now on. She breathes and heads back in.

“I have to go get my car,” Brooke says to Vanessa, who is scrubbing dishes in the kitchen. Brooke searches through the detritus on the counter for her car keys. “Do you want to come with me?”

Vanessa’s hands still; the glass is clear of suds but the water is still running. Brooke reaches over her to shut off the tap.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, and the room is too quiet.

“No, you’re right, I should probably go back." 

That isn’t what Brooke meant, and it’s definitely not what she wants. As they sort through the wreckage of the day, the real world seems to be catching up to them little by little. The real world, the normal world, which doesn’t revolve around them together at its center.

(Brooke is maybe starting to forget the contours of a world like that. It gets a little fuzzier every time Vanessa’s fingers brush her temple and she tells her – no,  _shows her_  – that everything is going to be okay.)

“No, no, stay here. You can, um…” Brooke fishes for a reason for her to stay behind that is relatively sensible, comes up a bit short. “You can burn the clothes. Or scrub the blood out of the driveway.”

“Glamorous.” Vanessa smiles like she’s trying to hold it back, and Brooke knows they’re on the same page. Vanessa’s hand is in hers and she’s not quite sure how it got there but she gives it a tight squeeze, only letting it slip with the knowledge that she’ll get to hold it again soon.

Brooke shows her how to work the fireplace in the backyard, fumbles with it a little as she and Jason never really hosted the outdoor cookouts she had dreamed of when they first bought the house.

She calls herself a car and says goodbye to Vanessa. It’s the first time they’ll be apart since the world hopped off the rails and started careening into god knows where. Brooke knows it shouldn’t feel scary, but it does. She’s not sure whether she should touch Vanessa, hug her, kiss her; the air hangs heavy with that unanswered question, another loose end.

Vanessa cuts the tension. “Go on. Maybe I’ll roast some smores while you’re gone.” She reaches out, touches Brooke’s elbow lightly, sends a shock that reverberates down to her fingertips.

“Hey!” She knows what that is now, knows it’s intentional, and she holds her hand over the spot as if to keep the magic from escaping.

“What?” Vanessa feigns innocence, a bit of a laugh behind her eyes. Brooke’s heart jumps, and she feels approximately sixteen.

She leaves with a smile and a little bit more stardust.

As she climbs into the waiting car, she thinks about Vanessa alone in her home, roasting marshmallows in her backyard, potentially burning the place down. It wouldn’t matter. She’d buy a new house, one without so many dark memories and a little bit more sunlight and no bodies in the backyard. She could move with Vanessa to the other side of the country, where they could start over, maybe. 

And shit, that’s too fast. She shouldn’t think that way, but if her heart has brakes, she doesn’t know where to find them and nothing is out of the question now. She’s speeding full force into an open mess of possibility, equal parts horrifying and promising, one hundred percent unpredictable.

Weirdly, she wouldn’t trade it.

The driver is listening to  _Don’t Stop_  by Fleetwood Mac. It’s a little on the nose, sure, but she asks him to turn it up anyway.

 

\--

 

Vanessa’s place in the daylight is jarringly charming. She lives on a residential street; there are people pushing babies in strollers and walking golden retrievers and there’s light filtering in through the gaps in the leaves on the trees. She’d only ever been around to drop Vanessa off at night, when the dread of going back overpowered any other perception of the neighborhood.

They left the door unlocked. For a second she worries, but nothing is missing, at least none of the things Vanessa had thrown into bags and left in a pile by the door. She scoops them over her shoulder, a little bit awkward, but manageable to maneuver down the stairs.

The kitchen still smells like lavender. She doesn’t linger.

Brooke leaves so quickly that she almost bulldozes over the caramel-haired woman who is waiting just outside the screen door.

“You’re not Vanessa,” the woman observes.

This is probably a cop. That’s what the nerves clawing in her chest are telling her. This is an impeccably disguised plainclothes officer dressed in athleisure with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Brooke’s made it this far, though, and not even a nightmare scenario panic fantasy is going to stop her now. She sets her shoulders, imperceptibly clenches her jaw.

“No, I’m not,” she answers simply. 

“Okay, so are you just stealing her things?”

“No. She told me to come get them for her. That’s my car right there.”

“That car was parked here overnight.” The woman narrows her eyes, waits.

Brooke’s stomach lurches, and something feels very wrong. “Mmhm,” is all she gives her.

“Oh my god, you’re so  _serious_! I’m just messing with you.” The woman’s face softens, and Brooke doesn’t believe her for a second. It’s a convincing nosy neighbor routine, Brooke will give her that. “I just came over because I saw you from across the alley, and I liked your shirt. Where did you get it?" 

It’s a vertical pink stripe button down that’s still wrinkly from where she picked it off of her floor after stripping off yet another bloody tee for Vanessa to burn.

“Um.” Brooke twists the sleeve between her fingers. “It’s J. Crew.”

“Okay. Well, when her body turns up at least I’ll know how to describe you. Tall blonde J. Crew model, got it.”

Brooke feels like she might puke but she smiles through the bile in her throat. “That’s funny.”

“I’m kidding! Seriously, though, tell her to text me. I’m Scarlet. I get worried about her. You probably know—”

“Yeah,” Brooke interrupts because it’s all she can handle. “I’ll tell her you were here.” She tries to say that last bit like it’s a threat, but she’s not sure it lands. Scarlet’s more than a little hard to read. 

“Here, lemme help you.” She takes a duffel bag out of Brooke’s hand before she can protest, and Brooke has to follow her down the stairs.

Scarlet waves at her as she drives away. Brooke feels an ache settle into the back of her neck that pulses with her quickening heart.

 

\--

 

Alone in the car, Brooke has a good spiral. Ultimately, it’s mappable, even if it feels like an explosion of morbid confetti as she’s experiencing it.

A.   That was a cop. Her name isn’t Scarlet, but Brooke will say that name to Vanessa and Vanessa will look back at her blankly because she’s never heard of any Scarlet who lives on the other side of the alley. Scarlet will have her license plate number, and a SWAT team will shortly break through the door.

B.    That wasn’t a cop. That was a neighbor who, like all of Vanessa’s neighbors, are going to notice that things are off. There will be gossip. There will be speculation. And someone (Scarlet) is bound to joke about the right things to the wrong people.

C.    That was a mirage, another ghost of her guilt, and Brooke is slowly leaving the human world of science and logic for a land with no rules, no guide rails, no compasses.

Brooke has made it to Scenario C by the time she’s pulled into her driveway. She’s got no solid refutations other than “there’s no such thing as ghosts,” but even that seems to be a questionable idea now. She can feel her own heartbeat as it reverberates against the pain in her neck, an unnerving reminder of the way it starts to race out of her own control when she overthinks.

Vanessa isn’t sitting at the breakfast bar, isn’t lounging on the couch, and it looks like the fireplace outside is still untouched. Her stomach twists with worry, but then she hears music coming from down the hall and a creak in the floorboards. If it’s a ghost, it’s a festive one.

It’s not, though. Brooke peeks in through the crack in the door to her room to see Vanessa shimmying, singing along loud and confident and endearingly off key as she arranges a stack of clothes on the end of Brooke’s bed. It’s a few shirts, Brooke’s favorite pair of jeans that once had a bloody handprint on them, clean and dry and folded neatly. Vanessa’s folding her own pants right now, the ones she had been wearing last night, setting them gently in a stack on top of Brooke’s.

Vanessa may not have been able to get her fireplace to work, but she’s sure figured out how to connect to the speaker system. She’s playing some song in Spanish, which Brooke doesn’t understand, but it’s all upbeat and full of attitude:  _esto está encendío, na na na na_. And Vanessa just looks  _right_. Happy.

Brooke can still feel her own heartbeat. Different, though.

The song shifts and Vanessa whips around in time with the music, catching Brooke’s eye. She doesn’t even try to hide the smile that lights up her face when she realizes Brooke is back.

“What? You never seen anyone folding laundry before?” Vanessa doesn’t miss a beat, jumps right back in to swaying.

“When I do it, I usually don’t have a soundtrack,” Brooke laughs.

“You gotta have a soundtrack. Always. It’s something my mama used to always do to cheer me up.”

Then Brooke notices. Vanessa is wearing her poutine shirt. It’s big on her, and it does look horribly dorky but also so adorable and endearing that for a second the throbbing pain in her neck stops, maybe because her heart skipped a beat.

“You…” Brooke starts, but she doesn’t have the words. Vanessa is wearing her clothes, in her bedroom, playing music on her speakers.

She rolls her eyes with a smile. “I know I said I was going to burn it. But then these little guys kept looking up at me with their dumb googly eyes and I couldn’t do it. And I remembered you’re rich and you have shit like stain remover, so I saved what I could.”

“You wanted to burn it so badly!”

“Fuck you.” She beams and plays with the hem of the shirt. “It came out of the dryer all warm. And it’s cozy.”

(Brooke wants a home. That’s it, that’s the word she’s been searching for. A home isn’t a building with furniture and fully stocked spice racks, it isn’t a husband and two projected children, it isn’t even a garden and a sunny kitchen. Those things are just pieces that are supposed to go together, that get forced together way too often. But that doesn’t make a home. A home is the right pieces assembled in the right place at the right time. For the right reasons.)

There’s a moment where Brooke thinks about saying something she shouldn’t, but thankfully Vanessa jumps in. 

“You looked all shook up when you came in here. Did something happen?”

The pain in her neck reminds her it’s still there. “Do you know someone named Scarlet?”

“Oh, that bitch. What did she say to you?”

 _Thank god_ , Brooke wants to whisper. Scarlet’s just a person. A strange person, but just a person.

“Nothing, really,” Brooke answers, “I think I’m just getting paranoid.”

“Yeah, she’s across the street a lot, she doesn’t even live there, but that’s not the point. She’s nobody bad.”

“Good, that’s good.” Brooke wants to kick herself for letting her mind run away from her like that, but she knows that edge of worry isn’t going away anytime soon. She winces a bit as she rubs at the back of her neck, trying to get the pain to simmer down.

“What’s wrong?”

“My neck, but it’s nothing—”

“C’mere. Sit.” Vanessa clicks her tongue disapprovingly, and pulls Brooke to the edge of the bed. She sits down, feels Vanessa cross her legs against her back, and she can’t help but lean into it just a little.

Vanessa brushes Brooke’s hair off the back of her neck, and Brooke isn’t sure if she’s using any magic or if this is just what Vanessa does to her now, but she’s never been more eager to be touched.

Vanessa presses her fingers into the tense tendons along Brooke’s neck, down and into her shoulders, finding and working on the thickened knots that have formed.

“Baby, I know you can afford massages, this is  _rough_.”

When she was a dancer, Brooke had to force the tension out of her shoulders by any means necessary. Sometimes it was the slow route, learning to breathe and expand, but more often than not it was a hard tennis ball between her shoulder and a wall, or a friend’s elbow digging sharply into a knot in her back.  _This_ , though. This is ethereal, and she feels her shoulders start to drop, her neck start to loosen, just a little.

Vanessa hums, and she stops kneading, her thumbs coming to rest over the last vertebra of Brooke’s neck before it breaks into her shoulders. “Found it,” Vanessa murmurs.

She doesn’t press in, keeps her fingers light and barely ghosting over Brooke’s skin. And then she feels it, what must be the magic. It’s like a sparkler under her skin, a somehow soft and unobtrusive firework that dazzles away the pain and pushes it out like a draining funnel through Vanessa’s fingers on Brooke’s spine. The knots break apart, and she feels her body lengthen, loosen, settle.

“ _Oh_.” Brooke can’t help it. She feels her own voice ring low in her chest as she breathes out. Her head drops forward instinctively. “That’s…” Brooke can barely speak, doesn’t know why she’s trying. “Holy shit, that feels incredible.”

She hears Vanessa chuckle lightly. “I can’t get it all. I don’t know, there’s something weird about it, but… does that feel better?”

“ _So_  much better.” The sparklers start to burn out and it doesn’t matter if it’s not all gone, the pain, the tension, whatever. Brooke rolls her neck a little, reveling in how it feels more open and aligned than any yoga class has ever made her feel.

Brooke’s ready to turn around, maybe lean into Vanessa’s side because she’s feeling loose and bold, but she hesitates. Vanessa’s hand is still on her shoulder, her thumb brushing over the thin edge of her shirt collar, dipping under just barely.

And then— _oh_.

She feels Vanessa’s breath warm on her neck, and the soft press of lips against her skin.

It’s so unexpected, but she doesn’t tense up. If she was relaxed before, now she liquifies. She can’t help the way her breath hitches, can’t help the way she stretches her neck to give Vanessa more room, can’t help the soft, high hum of her own voice as Vanessa’s lips pull against her sensitive skin. She works her way slowly from the corner of Brooke’s jaw to the flat of her collarbone. Brooke feels the slightest nip of teeth and she might be cracking open. She might be breaking into innumerable pieces but that has never felt more  _correct_.

“Vanessa,” Brooke breathes, trying to sound as level and composed as she can.

But all of a sudden Vanessa isn’t touching her anymore, and a distance of a few inches feels like a mile. “Right, you’re right, too much, sorry.”

Brooke turns around immediately, grabs Vanessa’s wrists because they’re the first things she can find. “No, hey,” Brooke starts, but doesn’t know where to go. Vanessa’s eyes are locked on her, scared again, and it’s the last thing she ever wants to see.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.” Vanessa is frozen in place, her voice coming with just a small percentage of her normal energy. “I can’t read your mind.”

Brooke isn’t sure what she’s thinking, if she’s thinking at all. This morning, last night, she couldn’t have even thought to articulate what she was feeling. There were too many other loose ends to prioritize this, whatever was happening with them. But now with the body in the ground and Nina on her way home safe and Vanessa real and warm and concerned in front of her, there’s no more delaying.

She searches for the right words, can’t find them. She’s too blissed and transformed to worry about that, though. She loosens her grip on Vanessa in surrender. “Why did you kiss me? Last night, right now, why?”

Vanessa lets out the breath she’s been holding. “I think you know.”

“I don’t want to be wrong.”

“It wasn’t some panicked crazy murder kiss, if that’s what you’re asking.” Vanessa twists her hands out of Brooke’s grasp so that she’s holding one of her hands, tracing the whorls of her knuckles. “I meant it. I wanted it. I’ve wanted it for a while. And I’m real fucking scared you don’t.”

Brooke is in a million shining pieces and about fifteen of them are still rational and functioning at this point. They’re no match for the desire that comes bubbling up through the wide-open cracks and spills out of her mouth.

“I want you,” Brooke says, unencumbered, unafraid, any semblance of evolutionary defenses obliterated. “I don’t think I’m supposed to, but fuck  _supposed_ , I want you, I want this, I  _want_ —"

Brooke isn’t sure who leans in first; it happens too fast. Maybe it’s both of them. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But what matters so intensely is the fire and the meaning and the purpose when their lips meet this time, the way Vanessa’s tongue curls like a flame against her own, the way Vanessa’s breath stutters when Brooke pulls her lip between her teeth.

Vanessa falls back onto the bed, kicks the pile of neatly folded clothes into a lump on the floor. Brooke laughs as Vanessa pulls her down on top of her, hand fisting tight in her shirt and pulling apart a few of the buttons. Their teeth clack and it’s messy but it’s right. Brooke uses one arm to hold herself steady while the other gets lost in Vanessa’s curls,  _finally, finally, finally_  echoing like a drum beat in the back of her mind. 

( _One good thing. At least there’s one good thing._  That thought’s softer, more distant, but certainly there. It’s an important one.)

Vanessa’s hands settle on her hips, link through her belt loops, and Brooke laces her legs in between Vanessa’s. And yes, okay,  _fuck_ , she hasn’t felt this kind of need in years, the way she’s desperate for some kind of pressure. She pins Vanessa’s hips down with one hand, grinds against her.

“Touch me,” Vanessa breathes into her neck like she knows it’s exactly what Brooke needs to hear. “Touch me  _please_.”

Brooke’s hand drifts from Vanessa’s hip bone to between her legs. It’s already overwhelming, how warm she feels, even through her jeans. Vanessa rolls her body into Brooke’s touch, whines soft and pretty and exactly her, and Brooke is undoing her jeans, pushing them down somehow confident and sure.

“Wait,” Vanessa breathes, and Brooke freezes with her hand hovering excruciatingly close to Vanessa’s panties. “Wanna try something.”

Before Brooke can ask what she means, she starts to feel tingles over her hand, some feather-light force pushing it lower. She would think that Vanessa was guiding her with her own hand, but Brooke can feel them both bracketing her head, fingernails scratching into her scalp.

“Are you… Is this…?” Brooke can’t articulate it. Vanessa can manipulate bodies, she knows that, but she hadn’t even  _conceived_ —

“Mhm.” Vanessa smiles soft, her face flushed.

And Brooke surrenders, lets the invisible force guide her hand because she trusts it to take her where she wants to go, trusts Vanessa with her body, her heart, her  _life_  even. It’s intense, but that doesn’t feel so terrifying as before. The glimmering force moves her hand up and under Vanessa’s panties, and slowly (too slowly) lower. 

When she draws her fingers through the slick wetness, that’s all Brooke. When she presses a finger in slow and sure, that’s all Brooke. When Vanessa throws her head back and whispers, “yes, god, oh baby,” that’s all Brooke. 

It’s a bad angle. Vanessa’s jeans are still mostly on and they’re too tight, but it’s worth the wrist pain and it’s worth the sweat to see Vanessa looking up at her with eyes that are mostly pupils. Brooke curls her finger up and Vanessa makes a sound that shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be human, and Brooke keeps pushing her for more, more, more.

It happens too fast, but most lightning strikes do. Three short gasps and Vanessa is coming, squeezing tight around her and biting into her collarbone. Vanessa’s breath is low and heavy as she sinks down into the comforter, an echo of thunder off the walls of Brooke’s bedroom.

“Wow,” Vanessa finally says between breaths.

“Yeah.” Brooke pulls her hand back and Vanessa’s hip shakes from oversensitivity. “Are you good?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m…” Vanessa shakes her head dreamily. “I’m really good.”

Her breathing isn’t slowing, and Brooke smiles a little. “Do you want a glass of water?”

“Yeah, actually.”

Brooke stands on legs that she shouldn’t trust, somehow makes it to the bathroom. As she fills the glass she considers herself in the mirror, almost unrecognizably disheveled. She pulls back the top of her collar, sees the red imprint of teeth in the shape of a half moon, and presses her fingers into it to try and recreate the sensation.

When she comes back, Vanessa has crawled up to the head of the bed, snuggled up under the comforter. Brooke hands her the glass of water and settles in beside her as she sips slowly.

“Still wanna touch you,” she says lazily. “Wanna make you feel good." 

“We’ve got time.” And damn, that fact feels nice. “Doesn’t have to be now.”

Vanessa nods, clearly sleepy, and hands the glass back to Brooke, who sets it on the bedside table. She settles into Brooke’s side.

“Stay here,” Brooke says softly into Vanessa’s hair as she slots her head against Brooke’s collarbone.

“You bet I’m staying, I couldn’t move if I tried.”

“No, I mean, stay here. Stay with me, for however long you need.”

A second passes, and Brooke wishes she could see Vanessa’s face. “You shouldn’t offer that.”

“I want you here. You said we’re in this together. I don’t think we should be apart.”

Brooke should be terrified. Those words shouldn’t feel sensical, but she can’t dream of an alternative. They’ve dug themselves into a hole, another painfully ironic turn of phrase, but this feels too right, too  _promising_  to ignore.

“Okay,” Vanessa says, barely a whisper, as she presses a soft kiss to the underside of Brooke’s jaw. “I’ll stay.”

\--

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Scarlet sits topless in her girlfriend’s bed and lights a cigarette. 

“Ashtray, bitch!” Yvie shouts as soon as she looks up from where she’s scrolling on her phone. She passes Scarlet a red ceramic plate from her bedside table; Scarlet is unperturbed. “I swear, one of these days you’re gonna light this bed on fire. 

Scarlet grins smugly. “You’re implying that I haven’t already?”

Yvie rolls her eyes and looks back down at her phone.

“I’m trying to talk to you!” Scarlet gestures weakly in her direction. “I’m trying to tell you about my day.”

“And I’m listening. Vanessa’s sleeping with an older blonde woman. I thought we already knew that.”

“There’s something weird going on, though. She was all jumpy. And she was carrying a bunch of Vanessa’s stuff." 

Yvie still doesn’t look up. “This might be a radical idea for you, but some people actually want to move in with their girlfriends.”

Scarlet gets quiet, pouts her lips around her cigarette as she takes a drag. “You’re being mean.”

“I’m sorry.” Yvie’s got a tendency to dig her heels in, but she knows better than to do that around Scarlet. She puts her phone down, stuffs it all the way under the pillow, and her voice gets sincere. “That was too much. Work is so soul-sucking lately, I’ve been out of it.”

“I thought you liked mysteries. Don’t you wanna solve this one?”

“I’d give anything for a good goddamn story. If I have to write one more fluff piece about a baby animal at the zoo I’m jumping straight into the enclosure.” Yvie traces listless lines across Scarlet’s bare arm, and Scarlet giggles and drops her head. “But I don’t think they’d bite at this one. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I’d read it!  _Secret Romance Rocks Local Neighborhood, Shatters Sad Man’s Heart_. That’s a great headline.”

“If I was writing for a 1950s gossip column, maybe.”

“Oh, you’re no fun.” Scarlet dabs out her cigarette in the ashtray, tries to feign disinterest.

Yvie cocks an eyebrow. “Wanna bet?”

She pushes Scarlet back down into the mattress, and she quickly changes her mind. 


	7. ya sabía que se rompía

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Brooke and Vanessa try to be normal, Scarlet pops champagne, and a literal ghost appears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh hello! It's been a while! I'll admit I had abandoned this story and dove headfirst into school this past semester, but I can't move on from this little world and I really want to see this through. There's no telling how long the next chapter will take, but I have a plan. 11 chapters total is an estimate. Let's see what more trouble I can get these two into.
> 
> Thank you to everyone following this for your patience. Thank you Meggie for your constant encouragement, ily. 
> 
> As always, your comments mean the world to me and keep me going!

It’s a slow news day, but every day is a slow news day in this town. So Yvie’s got her sketchpad unabashedly open over her work computer’s keyboard, knowing there’s no easy way she can make it look like she’s actually hard at work were someone to come in and check up on her.

She’s trying to find the line between human and starfish for the five-limbed creature she’s sketching, and it’s proving more of a challenge than she had anticipated. There’s only so many places you can locate a face. 

“Knock-knock,” a voice says aloud. Yvie cringes before she turns around, trying with little avail to block her sketch pad with her body. 

Her boss is in the doorway. He looks chipper, he’s got his fist raised as if he was going to knock on her cubicle wall but no, that would be too normal and unobtrusive of a thing for him to do. She smiles with as many teeth as she can show. “Hi, Patrick.”

“How’s that school carnival story coming along?”

“Almost done,” Yvie lies. It’s been sitting in her drafts folder completed for two days. It wasn’t a story she could make anything mildly edgy out of, so she banged out a haphazard scene of kids and goldfish and smiling parents that she couldn’t get away from quickly enough. “Just putting in some final touches.”

He must know Yvie hates him; she’s not subtle, and it bugs her even more that he pretends everything is perfectly peachy-keen. 

“That’s great! Because I’ve got something new for you.” He hands her a manila folder which she doesn’t open. “Something a little more exciting, a little more up your alley.”

“Great, I’ll take a look at it.” She sets the folder on her desk, turning away in the hope that he’ll leave.

“What are you drawing? Is that a starfish?”

_Fucking hell_.

She tosses the sketchpad into her desk drawer and slams it shut. “It’s nothing.”

“Well. Get me that carnival story by the end of the day!”

“Yup.”

She waits until she hears his footsteps recede, muffled by the dreary brown carpet, before she finally opens the folder. She’s curious, truly; that much she can’t pretend. 

And damn, he wasn’t lying. It’s a big story, technically. Definitely not the kind of thing Yvie usually gets assigned. The first page is a police report of a rich white lady getting carjacked in the middle of the day about a week ago. The woman is important; she’s the wife of the chair of the symphony board. Yvie’s seen her smiling face on a billboard near the bank downtown, and she looks chipper even in the driver’s license photo paperclipped right below the report. 

She knows the story she’s supposed to write. _Community Rocked by Violence: Your Personal Wealth is Always Under Threat,_ with a picture of this woman looking stoic and a little hurt. She’ll write a paragraph about maybe why the guy did it, trying to realize and flesh out the narrative, and Patrick will cut it in editing and simultaneously lob off another piece of her willpower and soul. This story is an opportunity, sure, but she already knows where it’ll go, knows how it’s supposed to end. 

She flips to the next page and the hairs on her arms stand on end.

It’s Victor fucking Paulson, smiling with his teeth but not with his eyes, in his Best Buy employee photograph. He’s the suspect, rumored missing for about a week, having taken off with this Nina West’s minivan. There’ll be no sympathetic paragraph for her editor to cut on this one, that’s for sure. She thinks of the screen door to his apartment slamming and waking Yvie up at three in the morning, Vanessa’s voice ricocheting off the buildings as she shouts back up at him, his cold and terse words back at her lost in the buzz of the bugs chirping in the night. He’s an asshole, Yvie knows that for sure. But this level of criminality is downright eerie. She whips out her phone to tell Scarlet. 

Y: Have you seen Victor at all this week?

S: no, why?

Y: He stole a car, nobody’s heard from him in a while

Y: Just got assigned the story at work

S: sounds about right for him

S: that’s a big story baby!! happy 4 you

Y: Thanks, but it’s weird right?

S: it is

S: but as they say

S: bye bitch

Yvie chuckles and send back the thankful emoji. That explains why the neighborhood has felt different, why she hasn’t seen anyone coming or going from Victor and Vanessa’s apartment in the last couple of days. She wants to roll her eyes a bit at Vanessa for moving in with that older blonde woman the second her boyfriend skipped town, but she’s seen quicker U-Hauls and frankly doesn’t blame her. 

She finds a sticky note on the back of Victor’s photograph. It’s in Patrick’s neat handwriting: _police dragging their feet, he’s friends with cops, maybe investigate?_

“Oh fuck yeah,” Yvie mutters aloud. 

The non-starfish in her desk can wait. Yvie’s finally got a real mystery to solve. 

\--

“Vaaaaaanjie! Your girlfriend’s here with coffee!”

Silky’s voice booms through the dress store, earning them a concerned look from the few people shopping and a narrow glare from Vanessa’s boss behind the register. Brooke flushes red, nearly spills the latte she’s holding on the wall of wedding dresses beside them. Silky cackles as Vanessa pokes her head out from the dressing room.

“Bitch!” Vanessa hisses under her breath, loosely shoving Silky out of the way. Her cold glare melts as she shoulders up next to Brooke.

“Vanjie, huh?”

“You better not start calling me that.” Vanessa takes the coffee from Brooke’s hand with a well-concealed smirk. “Thank you, baby.”

She doesn’t bring up the “girlfriend” thing. They’re not girlfriends. They haven’t discussed it, haven’t thought to put a word on it. It feels risky, trying to cram whatever tenuous but wonderful arrangement they’ve managed to develop over the past couple of weeks into the box of a word. Besides, “girlfriend” feels frivolous. This is something else, not quite documented with language yet.

“You get off at six, right?” Brooke tucks a loose strand of Vanessa’s hair behind her ear.

“Six, yeah.”

“How does stir fry sound for dinner? I got some purple cauliflower at the farmers market and some Thai peppers and I wanna give it a go.”

“They make cauliflower in purple?”

“Vanessa!” A woman pokes her head out from behind the dressing room curtains, and Brooke watches the ice sink back into Vanessa’s eyes. “I think you already took your break?”

“Be right there!” Vanessa affects her voice, a kind of faux-sweetness that makes Brooke laugh while Vanessa’s manager turns away with a stern eye. 

“That sounds real good baby,” she continues, voice softer, “but everything you make is good.”

Brooke rolls her eyes, knows it’s not worth it to argue with Vanessa on that. “I’ll have it ready a little after six, then.”

“I’ll be there.” Vanessa pops up on her toes to press a quick kiss to Brooke’s lips. She breaks into a smile that Brooke can’t help but mirror.

So it’s like that, mostly. It’s easy.

Brooke doesn’t really notice when Vanessa stops promising she’ll go back to her apartment eventually. Brooke didn’t really believe her in the first place, especially when the promises always came when Vanessa was splayed out adorably on the couch or picking up a pile of recently discarded clothing next to Brooke’s bed. Eventually Brooke suggested that Vanessa hang her work clothes up in the empty closet that used to be Jason’s, and that’s probably the moment that solidifies it. 

Vanessa moves in. Her duffel bags empty out and disappear, and her makeup spreads across Brooke’s bathroom counter. The cabinets fill up with Takis and sour candy and other foods that would scald Brooke’s mouth, the fridge is stocked with leftover Chinese food Vanessa picks up for them both after work some nights. 

It’s nothing like when she first moved in with Jason. He liked space, distance, room to think. Even in those early months he would lock himself away in his office after dinner and go to bed without saying goodnight. But Vanessa joins her in the shower, wraps her arms around Brooke’s waist when she’s cooking, falls asleep with her fingers laced against Brooke’s. Brooke thought maybe she just wasn’t cut out for domesticity. But this feels so fresh and good and _right_.

Whatever the opposite of loneliness is, Brooke thinks this is it. 

It’s a week or so later and they’re sitting by the fireplace, wrapped up together underneath a knitted blanket Vanessa’s abuela had made, while Brooke flips through a Chekov play and Vanessa scrolls through her phone. Vanessa curls against Brooke’s side, a closeness and comfort that’s become thrillingly normal. 

“This feels so easy,” Vanessa breathes into the collar of Brooke’s shirt. “Should it feel this easy?”

Brooke knows what Vanessa means. She tucks her book between the couch cushions and cards a hand through Vanessa’s hair. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I just…” Vanessa sighs, straightens up, bites her lip. It’s a serious and vulnerable face, one that reminds Brooke too sharply where they are and how they got there. “I always wanted some fairytale romance, you know I love that sappy shit. Like in a rom-com where everything sorts out nice and happy in the end. And this, _you_ , this feels like the end of the movie.” Her fingers trace around Brooke’s wrist. “But I keep looking over my shoulder. I keep checking under the bed. I keep biting my lip when I drive past cops, and I don’t know if that’s going to get any easier.”

Brooke pulls her close again, feels the emotion welling up in Vanessa’s shoulders and presses a hand against them, wishing she had her own magic to will it away. “I want it all to be easy. But life’s not a movie.”

“I know. I just want it to be.”

It’s quiet except for a few sniffles. Brooke holds her because it’s all she can do. 

“Do you think we’ll ever get to be normal?” Vanessa asks after a moment.

Brooke smiles a little. “We were never normal.” 

“Can we try it for a while? Cook dinner together, watch trash TV, tell me the shit from your past and I’ll tell you mine?”

That Vanessa’s eyes can glimmer like that after all of it, after everything, is reason enough to agree.

When Jason was still alive, Brooke had given up on a home. Hell, she’d largely abandoned love, or the concept of getting anything she’d expected or hoped for in life. Even someone who seemed like the most brilliant match -- wealthy, educated, with famous friends and a divine record collection -- could ruin your world, take and take until you were hollow and fragile as a seashell. Vanessa was far from her fairytale fantasy. Vanessa ticked none of the boxes she’d learn to look for. But life is not a movie, and maybe she could throw out that broke-ballerina-to-trophy-wife storyline script along with the coldness and cynicism she’d so far managed to shake. 

“I want that,” Brooke breathes. “Yes, please, let’s be normal.”

Vanessa smells like spice today, cinnamon sugar with cloves. She laughs a soft laugh that’s just for Brooke, one that crackles like a fireplace. It’s warm here, Brooke thinks, the kind of place she could make a home.

\--

The next morning, normal gets off to a rocky start.

The doorbell rings at eight A.M., and Brooke wraps herself in a robe to answer it. Her shoulders tense when she sees the gardener, who’d dug up her backyard before there was another body to bury. She had forgotten to call him to tell him there was no garden to fix, an oversight that snapped her immediately awake. 

“Morning, ma’am. Warmer day today, thought I’d fill in your garden plot out back.” He’s chipper. 

“Oh, that won’t be necessary. It’s already filled in.” She mirrors his smile. “Just eager to start planting, that’s all. I’ll still pay you for today, of course.”

The gardener looks at his shoes, and then towards the gate. Brooke holds the silence, an old trick she’d learned at fundraisers with Jason to maintain control of an unpredictable situation, when someone else was thinking. Any awkward silence can be a power grab if you minutely twist it in your favor. Fortunately the man doesn’t need much convincing.

“Alright then, Ms. Hytes. Thank you for your business.” He turns to leave and grabs something at the base of the doorstep. “Oh, and here’s your paper.”

She takes the paper from him, lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding as the door clicks behind her. That hadn’t been suspicious, she’s pretty sure, and her confidence grows by a centimeter.

She’d never cancelled Jason’s Sunday paper subscription, and she barely kept up with local news anyway. She lays it absently on the kitchen island while she fumbles with the french press, still a little too sleepy to remember exactly how strong Vanessa liked her coffee. Very strong, she guesses, and dumps and inordinate scoop of grounds into the glass. 

“You bringing me breakfast in bed?” Vanessa appears in the archway, wrapped tightly in the comforter she dragged along with her. 

Brooke smiles. She can’t think of a better morning. “Yeah, get back in there.” She pops a few slices of sourdough in the toaster. 

“It’s cold without you.” She moves towards Brooke, nestling back into her. For a brief moment she allows herself that indulgent, cliche thought: they fit well together. 

“If you were wearing clothes--” Brooke starts to tease, but then she catches sight of the front page of the paper, and her face contorts in shock.

“What? Did I--” But then Vanessa sees it too, and her shoulders tighten. “Shit,” she breathes.

The lower quarter of the front page is Victor’s face in black and white, stern and unfeeling. It’s his Best Buy employee badge photo. There’s a smaller photograph of Nina with Jon and the kids, their Christmas card photo from this year. But she can’t look away from Victor, whose gaze seems to be boring holes right through the newsprint. 

Brooke reads over Vanessa’s shoulder. Thankfully, there’s not much there. It’s a scathing indictment of the police working on the case, who refused to tell the reporter nearly any of the details they had, apparently because they weren’t looking into it. It’s a call for answers, ones that the reporter herself wasn’t able to find. That’s good. That’s something. 

“They’re still looking for him,” Vanessa says, worried. 

“The police aren’t.” Brooke bites her lip, and rubs small circles into the skin of Vanessa’s shoulder with her thumb. “And Nina won’t push them. There’s nothing here to worry about.” And Brooke surprises herself by believing it. 

The toast pops up. The kitchen smells like rosemary. 

“Let’s forget about it, then.” Vanessa turns away for a moment, shakes her joints loose, and then looks up at Brooke with the trusting beginning of a smile. “We can forget about it.”

Brooke rolls up the newspaper and wedges it underneath folded cardboard in the recycling bin.

\--

“The front page!” 

Scarlet elatedly drops the newspaper down on the bed where Yvie is still cocooned in the covers. Yvie saw a draft before it went to print, so this is no surprise, but Scarlet’s bright energy this early in the morning hits squarely her like a dropped pallet of bricks. 

“Under the fold,” Yvie murmurs, snaking an arm out to peek at it.

“Yeah, but it’s the front page! My girlfriend is on the front page on a _Sunday_. I’m getting this framed.” Scarlet bounces on and off the bed, then heads for the kitchen. “And I’m popping champagne.”

Scarlet likes champagne, always keeps a bottle or two in the back of the fridge to mark the smallest celebratory occasions, so it’s not that rare of a moment. There’s no orange juice for mimosas, but that doesn’t stop her. Yvie knows it makes her happy to pop a bottle, so she lets Scarlet shoot it off over her bed and the cork smashes directly into the light fixture. Scarlet cackles, Yvie rolls her eyes, and they drink directly out of the bottle.

“I hope this doesn’t lead to them actually finding him,” Yvie says between sips. “It’s been so much quieter next door.”

“He’d end up in jail, right? Or at least if he came back there’s no one left for him to shout at.”

“Lucky Vanessa.”

Yvie missed having her around, and she knew Scarlet missed having someone to snoop on. But even then, she knew that anything would be better for Vanessa than staying in that place. Yvie left home on her eighteenth birthday. She knows the allure of an escape hatch. 

Still, there was more that just felt… _off_ about Victor’s disappearance. While she had been researching the story, Yvie had called the toll companies for the highways outside of town, and there was no evidence of any plates matching the ones on the stolen car. _D15NEY_ , a cheesy vanity plate she’d repeated too many times to forget. He could have taken back roads, sure, but stolen cars just usually don’t stay stolen for long. It got under her skin that the police hadn’t called to ask those questions, though they still didn’t have any satisfying answers.

Maybe that wasn’t her job. Maybe that was well above her pay grade. Maybe she shouldn’t be so bothered about a rich white lady who lost her minivan. But she had a feeling that kept itching at the back of her neck, Victor’s gaze glaring vacantly from that Best Buy photo, and the persistent inability to drop it. 

“Hey,” Scarlet says, snapping Yvie back to reality. “I’m proud of you. And you should be proud of you too.”

Yvie leans over to kiss Scarlet’s forehead. “I am.” It’s not a lie. It’ll open up more interesting projects at the paper, maybe even a promotion out of working under Patrick down the line. And then a bigger paper, and then something national… She’s getting ahead of herself.

“And hey,” Yvie says instead. “You know I love you, right?”

Scarlet beams and nods and scoots up the bed to kiss her, but her foot gets caught in a blanket and she topples forward. Champagne splashes on the comforter, which has seen much worse, and Yvie laughs as Scarlet rolls into her arms.

“Drinking on an empty stomach at nine in the morning…” Scarlet muses to herself. “Bad idea.”

Yvie finally pulls herself out of bed, and drags Scarlet along with her. “C’mon, put a shirt on. I’ll make you toast.”

\--

It still looks a bit like an unmarked grave, so Brooke plants her garden.

It’s winter, but they’re pretty far south and Brooke researches some plants that are hardy enough to still grow. Spinach, kale, rainbow chard; dropping the seeds into the soil feels like she’s sending them on a doomed mission, but she does it anyway. But soon they sprout, soon they flourish, and Brooke can hardly contain her excitement. 

“It’s all the extra nutrients they got in there,” Vanessa jokes when Brooke drags her out into the yard to show her the leaves peeking out through the dirt. Brooke isn’t sure whether to grit her teeth or laugh, so she does both. 

Maybe Vanessa’s right. A corpse in a garden is something like compost. 

Soon they’ve got more greens than they know what to do with. They make salads and stir-frys and smoothies but it’s still more than they can eat. Brooke snags a small stand at a weekly farmer’s market, and gets hooked on this new reason to get out of the house. She quickly learns why it was the last spot available, nestled between a particularly smelly fishery and an apiary that likes to bring along some of their bees, but she learns to live with it and breathe through her mouth and she sells the veggies off at rock bottom prices. Turns out Vanessa’s magic can get rid of bee stings like they’re nothing. 

Time passes. The cold air softens, and a weed springs up from a crack in the cement under the carport and weaves itself through the spokes on the wheel of Nina’s van.

Holidays with their respective families come and go. Brooke is grateful her family is too cautious and uptight about grief to ask her if she’s seeing anyone, but when she facetimes with Vanessa that night she finds out there’s a horde of Mateos eager to meet her. They come over in early February, and Brooke and Paula cook side by side while Vanessa’s cousins gleefully raid the liquor cabinet. 

She overhears Paula whispering something in Spanish to Vanessa in the hallway -- _esta suerte, para encontrar alguien tan sincera y cálida e inteligente, es algo que solo ocurre una vez en la vida_ \-- too fast and affected for Brooke to understand. A second later she sees Vanessa dabbing at red eyes, careful with her makeup, and Brooke gathers her up in her arms.

“They’re happy tears,” Vanessa explains. “Really happy ones.” Brooke kisses her eyelids anyway.

They manage to get Nina, Silky, and A’keria together in the same room for a dinner party, and the night seems to be off to a rough start when Silky shouts over every carefully planned conversation starter Nina tries to initiate. But there’s very little an entire bottle of tequila can’t fix, and soon Nina and A’keria are dancing to Nicki Minaj while Vanessa and Silky shout out less-than-tasteful alternate lyrics over the music. They all crash in guest rooms, and Brooke is pretty sure she can hear Nina mumble, “Much more comfortable than the back of my car,” before she falls asleep on top of the covers with her clothes on.

Vanessa says it first. Brooke brings her an iced dragonfruit tea with boba home from the farmer’s market on a Tuesday afternoon. Vanessa is wrapped in a tangle of blankets on the couch, nearly finished with the Donna Tartt novel Brooke had gifted her just a few days before. She takes a huge sip from the drink, and with a mouth full of tapioca pearls, it’s a grateful sigh: “Ugh, I love you.”

It’s so casual that Brooke almost doesn’t catch it, and Vanessa is so wrapped up in the book that she doesn’t even look up. But Brooke pauses, waits, hopes. 

Vanessa looks up quizzically and Brooke watches the gears in her head turn. The color rushes from Vanessa’s face as she catches up. “Oh fuck, I mean--”

“I love you too.”

“I _love_ you,” Vanessa says it again, and Brooke knows that the dopiest smile is spreading across her face. Bubble tea forgotten, Vanessa climbs into her arms. They say it back and forth until the words almost lose meaning on their tongues. 

She’d said it to a few high school boyfriends, said it to Jason, said it to the Icelandic ballerina after a week and scared her away, but this is the first time it’s felt right, and mutually true. Now Brooke says it whenever Vanessa leaves for work for the day; Vanessa says it when she comes against Brooke’s mouth and she could never have imagined _I love you_ sounding both holy and obscene. 

It’s like nothing ever happened. Normal works, until the ground thaws.

For a few rainy days in early April, Brooke lets the garden go untended. She’s about to plant her first tomatoes, and she wants to make sure she has the perfect weather to be able to spend all day lining them up in perfect rows. Her shoes squelch in the mud, a feeling she’s almost come to enjoy, along with the dirt that cakes into her knees as she crouches down. 

But then she catches it. There’s a corner of a black trash bag peeking up from the dark soil.

She wants to live in the moment where it’s just a piece of trash that’s blown in from another yard, before everything clicks into its horrible place. It’s torn on the edges, tattered like an animal had gnawed at it. _Shit_. She’s scooping soil on top of it before she can even think, pushing it back down into the ground and far away. She feels something shift, something that is decidedly not soil underneath her hands but she refuses to think about it, refuses to give it a name. 

The tomatoes won’t get planted today. She’ll wait for another day of rain to wash away that texture beneath her fingers, and that memory from her skin. 

When she stands, she feels a tweak in her back and winces. It doesn’t resolve when she stretches or twists, just pinches back harder with every breath. Of course. Phenomenal. 

Brooke pours herself a glass of wine and takes a bath. It’s three in the afternoon, but that doesn’t matter. Warm water doesn’t loosen the tension in her muscles, and the lavender scent of the bubble soap seems oddly tinted with hints of iron. She closes her eyes and resists excavating anything she’s managed to keep buried for months now.

She’s dressed in sweats when Vanessa gets home from work, curled still uncomfortably on the couch. 

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“I pulled something, I think.” Brooke omits any mention of the trash bag in the garden. It’s gone now, and it will stay gone, no need to bring it back up.

“Here, sit up.” Vanessa’s hands on her shoulders are an instant relief. 

Vanessa doesn’t use her magic often, doesn’t need to. She’ll use it to wipe away her own bruises from running into cabinets or when Brooke’s got a pimple in the middle of her forehead, and on the rare and glorious occasion, in bed. Now, Brooke feels the warmth from Vanessa’s hands sparkling under her skin. The knot against her spine comes undone, the stress that she hadn’t noticed before melts from her shoulders. 

Vanessa catches it. “You doing okay?

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” It’s a lie, and Brooke hopes Vanessa can’t sense that. 

Vanessa hums and Brooke feels her reaching deeper, into the base of her spine. Something opens. “I think I--”

Lightning strikes. It feels the way broken glass sounds, exploding in shards that crackle their way up and down Brooke’s back. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Vanessa shouts, pulling her hand back sharply and shaking it like she’s been burned. 

“What was that?” Brooke tries to reach for Vanessa, tries to comfort her, but she holds her hand close to her chest. The electricity lingers in Brooke’s body, crackling like a blanket loaded with static.

“I don’t know.” Vanessa rubs her palm, pain in her face. Brooke wonders if she can heal that kind of thing herself. “Abuela never… I don’t know. Fuck, I’m sorry, baby.”

“ _I’m_ sorry.”

Vanessa gets up and runs her hand under cold water. Brooke sits on the couch, silent and particularly helpless. 

Something is catching up with them, but Brooke has no words for it. It’s seeping into their normal, which turns out to be more fragile than she had thought. Ordered rows of tomatoes and the easy comfort of fresh love feel a bit distant. She feels it in every vertebra. 

They decide that if nothing else, it’s a safe night for a TV binge. They order pizza and curl up on the couch, as Brooke holds tight to Vanessa and tries to settle into the weird static sensation in her spine. She catches Vanessa flexing her hands, rubbing her fingertips together, still feeling the aftereffects of the shock. They settle into bed like any other evening, huddled in the weight of too much unexplained. 

Most nights sleep comes easily, but tonight it’s miles away. She silently counts to ten, fifty, a hundred, and still can’t get the thrumming feeling of worry in her chest to go away. After an hour or so of sleeplessness, she slips her arms from around Vanessa and gets up to find a book in the living room. 

She stops suddenly before she can even make it to the living room.

Jason is sitting in a chair by the bar.

There are a few things you expect from a ghost. They’re supposed to be see-through, or pale and ragged like a corpse, or at the very least levitating. Jason is none of those things. He looks solid, human, too comfortable in a spot where he so often used to sit. He’s got a glass of dark liquor in his hand, swirling a large ice cube around, with a rueful smirk carved into his face. 

If she hadn’t watched him die, hadn’t felt him go cold, she might think he let himself back in with the key. 

“Brooke Lynn.” His voice has a sour edge, and she’s instantly reminded of how much she hates the way her name sounds when he says it. “It’s been too long.”

“This isn’t real,” she says confidently, elbow planted on the back of the other chair. 

He cocks an eyebrow. “You wanna test that?”

“Yeah, actually.”

Jason throws his glass at her, and she braces herself, but the glass passes through her, no impact. She glances over her shoulder, looking for glass shards or any sign that this was real. 

“I thought so.” Brooke narrows her eyes knowingly, a little self-righteously, and _god_ it feels way too good to be able to look at him like that with no repercussions. A bit callously, she sits in the chair across from him. 

“You still flinched,” he notes. There’s another glass in his hand, refilled with scotch and ice that clinks against the sides. 

“Why are you here?”

“You drank all my scotch.”

“Well, you weren’t drinking it.”

“And there’s a 26-year-old shop girl sleeping in my bed.”

“My bed, now.”

“You always were a vindictive bitch, weren’t you? Under all of that? She can’t see it now, but give it a year. You know you’re meant to be alone.”

Brooke bites the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood. Jason always knew how to drive a knife.

“Why are you here?” she repeats.

“You’re getting too comfortable, that’s why.” The ice clinks against his glass. “I’m here so you don’t forget.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, you didn’t even know him--”

“I’m talking about _me_ ,” he smirks.

“You always are.”

“Would you listen? God. Justify that body in your garden all you like, but can you justify what you did to me? Have you heard of divorces, Brooke Lynn? Police reports? Fighting back?” Brooke feels her jaw tighten, and Jason catches it. His eyes light up, his words drip with sickly-sweet contempt. “No, instead of facing me, you spit on the life I gave you and killed me. You’re cheap, you’re greedy. But there’s quite a few different ways to stab someone in the back, huh?”

“ _Stop_.”

Brooke feels ice prick at the base of her spine. It’s subtle, the first snowflakes just starting to fall. 

Jason laughs softly to himself. It’s a face she’s seen too many times on him, that smug self-righteousness, one she never imagined having to see again. It’s engraved in the contours of his face, she notes. There’s no way to know the cruelty behind those laugh lines.

“You said it, honey. None of this is real. What does that say about what’s going on inside your head?”

Brooke stands, turning to leave, to run. She wishes she had a drink to throw in his face, wishes she had some way to hurt him. “You’re burning in hell.”

“Go back to that girl,” he calls after her, and she can hear his cruel smile. “You’re going to destroy her.”

In the hallway outside the bedroom, Brooke presses her face into the sleeve of her sweatshirt and breathes. Each breath is ragged, threatening to turn into a sob, but she packs it up tight, pulls it inwards and downwards. The pinpricks spread. _Fuck_. 

Jason knows right how to get to her, how to wedge into those soft spots and make her wish they were never there. It’s impossible to write off. Ghost or fever dream, she’s haunted. 

She presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, sets her shoulders, and goes back to bed. She settles in next to Vanessa, who rolls back into her touch. 

“Hey, were you up?” she murmurs softly.

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep.” 

“You talking to someone?”

“Nina.” Brooke lies. “On the phone.”

“Mmm.” And she’s asleep again.

Two lies in one evening. _You’re going to destroy her,_ he said _._ Vanessa twists warm against her, settles against her chest. Brooke hopes Vanessa can’t feel her heart racing from where she rests her head.

Sleep comes in fragments, waves of unconsciousness so shallow she’s not even sure if she’s slept. Ice blue shards slice up and down her spine through the night.

**Author's Note:**

> I thrive on your comments!! hope you enjoyed! Find me @formercongressman on tumblr!


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